Brea Mayor Worked for Firm Seeking City Job : Government: He was employed by the company on an unrelated project and denies wrongdoing. Contract talks were canceled after a call from the state.

At the same time he was taking actions last year that boosted an Orange County engineering firm’s chance to win a city contract, the mayor of this community was teaming up with the company in a separate business deal, records and interviews show.

The actions of Brea Mayor Wayne D. Wedin came despite a California law that prohibits officials from participating in any governmental decision that stands to financially affect a source of their income.

Wedin, 51, is a former city manager of Brea and a well-known municipal finance consultant. He won election to the City Council in 1988.

During the last six months of 1990, Wedin took several actions in Brea affecting efforts of the Keith Cos., a Costa Mesa-based planning, engineering and architectural firm, to win a city contract. At stake was the North Brea Sphere of Influence study, a project intended to evaluate the best ways to develop about six square miles in the area of Tonner Canyon, on the Orange-Los Angeles county border.

At first, the Keith Cos. and a firm that it affiliated with for the project were rejected by the city planning staff, in part because of their high bid. However, with Wedin’s support, Keith and its partner were recommended by the City Council for a $320,000 contract.

But the selection was cast aside and negotiations to enter the contract were canceled on Dec. 27 after the Brea city attorney was called by an investigator from the California Fair Political Practices Commission. The agency had received an anonymous complaint questioning Wedin’s relationship with the Keith Cos.

After the call from the commission, Wedin said, he and City Atty. James L. Markman decided not to enter into any contract with the Keith Cos.

Interviews and records reviewed by The Times show that Wedin was working with the Keith Cos. on a separate San Diego project during four of the months that he was participating in Brea city government meetings involving the firm. Wedin said he received $41,000 on the San Diego project from October, 1989, to September, 1990, and that all of his billings were routed through the Keith Cos.

Wedin, who became mayor in December, said he did not think he had done anything wrong, noting that the city of Brea distanced itself from the Keith Cos. after the commission phone call. Wedin acknowledged that, from the outset, he was a part of Keith’s proposal to obtain the San Diego contract.

“If I could go back and redo it today,” Wedin said, “I wish I hadn’t done it that way because it’s caused an appearance of impropriety, I suppose.”

A copy of its investigative file shows that within one month, the commission--without knowing that Wedin was a subcontractor of the Keith Cos. in the San Diego project--closed its case and wrote in a letter that Wedin had not violated state law. Commission spokesman Jay Greenwood said Wednesday that the agency is reopening the case because of “new information” published Sunday in some editions of The Times.

The San Diego venture paired Wedin, who owns his own consulting firm, and the Keith Cos. in a project to redevelop a downtown neighborhood.

Kurt Chilcott, deputy director of the San Diego Redevelopment Agency, said Wedin “was part of the package proposed by the Keith Cos. The city’s contractual relationship was with the Keith Cos. And they were the ones that had the relationship with Wedin.”

Larry Mandell, a senior vice president for the Keith Cos., said the firm decided to work with Wedin in San Diego, not to gain any advantage in Brea but because “he’s probably one of the best people in his field when it comes to redevelopment and economic-development consulting.”

Wedin said that in his view the city of San Diego--not the Keith Cos.--was his source of income. If it were established that Wedin’s income source was the Keith Cos., he could be found in violation of the law, according to an interpretation provided by commission spokesman Greenwood.

Asked which such entity would be considered a public official’s source of income, Greenwood said: “We treat the primary contractor, not the ultimate recipient of the services, as the source of income, in this case, to the public official.” Greenwood would not comment on Wedin specifically.

Not in dispute is that Wedin, who also is one of two members of the City Council’s Development Committee, participated in Brea’s deliberations over the Tonner Canyon-area planning contract. For example:

* On June 6, 1990, Wedin asked city staff members to add the Keith Cos. and its affiliate, Leason Pomeroy Associates of Irvine, to the list of companies that would be asked to bid for the planning contract, according to minutes of the council’s June 6 Development Committee meeting.

In an interview, Wedin explained: “All I was doing was saying, ‘Here is someone who has an interest, send ‘em a note.’ ”

Ten companies were invited by the city to submit bids, and by July, five proposals had been received, ranging from $377,259 to the Keith Cos. team’s $1,075,400. The Brea staff evaluation of the bids, said the team’s proposed work hours and price tag were “very excessive.”

On Aug. 3, the staff endorsed as finalists two firms--P & D Technologies of Orange and Turrini & Brink of Santa Ana.

* On Sept. 6, Wedin proposed at a meeting of the council’s Development Committee that the team of Keith and its affiliate be chosen as a finalist for the project.

Wedin said: “It’s not uncommon that the council doesn’t accept the total staff recommendation. . . . I think that’s what our responsibility is: to make independent judgments.”

Wedin also noted that the city decided to scale back the project, rendering obsolete the original bids of $1 million from Keith-Leason Pomeroy and $489,872 from P & D Technologies.

* On Sept. 18, Wedin discussed the selection of the two finalists at a City Council meeting, according to the minutes. Wedin acknowledges that he favored the Keith-Leason Pomeroy team. But no decision was reached by that point, at least in part because Wedin and his colleague on the Development Committee, Councilwoman Clarice Blamer, could not agree.

“I wanted P & D and he wanted the other one,” Blamer said in an interview.

* On Dec. 18, Wedin participated in a meeting of the Development Committee in which Brea Development Services Director Jim Cutts described the status of the negotiations. Minutes show that Cutts announced that the Keith-Leason Pomeroy team had agreed to perform the desired work for $320,000.

But on Dec. 27, for reasons that were not divulged to the public, the arrangement collapsed. Records obtained from the commission show that it also was on Dec. 27 that agency investigator Don McCormick called Brea City Atty. Markman to ask about the anonymous, conflict-of-interest allegation.

After the call from the commission, Wedin told The Times, he and Markman decided “out of a due measure of caution” to prohibit Keith from receiving the planning contract or “any business” from the city of Brea for a period of about one year.

Markman said he viewed Wedin’s actions an “inadvertence,” adding: “I was very happy we caught it before we entered a contract.”