ORANGE COUNTY PERSPECTIVE : Too Much Country Club Coziness

The credibility of Orange County’s planning process has moved up a notch now that Supervisor Don R. Roth has asked for, and received, the resignation of Planning Commissioner C. Douglas Leavenworth.

It may be too much to hope that commissioners will henceforth always keep their distance from the people whose proposals they are supposed to evaluate. But that’s the standard that should be met, and the pattern of business-as-usual coziness between developers and planners appears to have been interrupted, at least. That has to be promising.

In removing one planning commissioner from the golf carts of developers, Roth didn’t find fault with the chumminess. He preferred instead to suggest that it merely was time for a change. The decision nevertheless was an important statement for Roth to make in a county where developers often get their way.

Although the Roth camp said otherwise, the timing of the resignation suggested that it was time to embark on a course correction. The dismissal followed closely the conclusion of an investigation by the state Fair Political Practices Commission, which decided not to penalize the commissioner for gifts he received from the Mission Viejo Co. in 1987. The decision came after a review of the commissioner’s contention that he originally had overvalued gifts in a 1988 financial disclosure statement, making them appear to be in excess of a state limit. The FPPC finding paralleled an earlier ruling in a criminal investigation by the Orange County district attorney’s office.

Both investigations left unexplored the larger issue of fraternization, which is the matter of most concern for the integrity of the planning process. In Orange County, two other commissioners were the focus of conflict-of-interest investigations last year, and there never was any doubt that Leavenworth freely took perks. The question before investigators was whether to accept the commissioner’s revised estimate. What the investigations showed more than anything was how much financial disclosure statements are the product of an honor system. Coziness was never at issue.

The larger point is that the public is poorly served when someone plays the system so close to the line. Leavenworth’s revised valuation of gifts made them $7.50 under the $250 limit, but if it had been $7.50 over, he wouldn’t have been much more compromised by the difference. The real issue was not how much the rounds of golf cost, but that they were played on a developer’s tab and tee time.