2 Guilty of Rigging School Work Bids : Courts: The contractors received suspended jail terms and three years of unsupervised probation for their part in the Orange district scandal.

Two contractors indicted in 1987 for their roles in the Orange Unified School District bid-rigging scandal were found guilty Monday of misappropriating public funds, but they received sentences that do not include jail terms or fines.

Orange County Superior Court Judge Myron S. Brown found Ronald Brock and William A. Gustafson, former officers of the Brock and Gustafson Construction Co. in Orange, guilty on five counts of conspiracy and embezzlement of public funds, including three felony counts. The two, who each received a suspended term of one year in County Jail and three years of unsupervised probation, said they felt vindicated by the sentence.

“We’ve always felt that this was a huge political witch hunt,” said Gustafson, who now has a construction business in Newport Beach. “We always knew that we’d be vindicated. . . . We knew that we completed every job and bid competitively.”

Monday’s hearing marked a final chapter in the biggest scandal to rock an Orange County school district in a decade. The case, the result of a two-year investigation by Orange police, led to the arrests and grand jury indictment of four alleged conspirators in 1986 and the downfall of four trustees accused of “willful misconduct” while on the board of the 38-school district, which serves about 25,000 students in Orange, Anaheim, Santa Ana, Villa Park and Garden Grove.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Donna L. Crandall said she was disappointed with the penalties against Gustafson and Brock, who each faced a maximum jail sentence of six years.

“It was not unexpected,” Crandall said. “But I don’t agree fully. I would have liked to have seen them punished more fully because of the seriousness of the offense.”

Sentencing was postponed until May for Steven L. Presson, the former school district maintenance officer accused by the 1987 Orange County grand jury of masterminding the bid-rigging scheme.

The case involved $2 million to $3 million in contracts for about 80 repair and construction jobs arranged from 1979-84. The grand jury charged that Presson, his wife, Elizabeth Diane, and the two construction contractors were part of a scheme to divert district jobs to selected companies in exchange for kickbacks of money, gifts and services.

Charges against Elizabeth Presson were dropped Monday due to insufficient evidence.

Presson’s attorney, Salvatore P. Ciulla, said he expects his client will receive a sentence similar to those handed down Monday at the May hearing. However, it is expected that the judge will also require Presson to pay $9,951 in restitution to the school district.

Crandall argued that the defendants were “actively involved in a conspiracy to take money and property from the Orange Unified School District, and the district has suffered and continues to suffer.”

While the district attorney’s office successfully proved the existence of a conspiracy, they were unable to document the exact amount of loss to the district, Crandall said.

Gustafson and Brock called the outcome of the case a victory.

“If they’d come to us at the beginning and asked us the proper questions, maybe this (case) never would have happened,” Brock said. “I’m very relieved. I can go on with my life now. My family especially will be relieved because it has put a lot of pressure on all of them.”

Still pending are three civil suits filed by the school district in 1988 to recover $689,000 from Presson and the two contractors.

The bid-rigging scandal also brought down four school trustees who were board members when the contracts were approved. The Orange County grand jury accused the trustees of “willful misconduct,” a non-criminal charge that, if proven, would have required the judge to dismiss the board members.

The grand jury said the bid-rigging occurred because the members did a poor job of overseeing the district.