Legislator Questions Lockwood’s Judgment : Politics: Former city manager may face questions about City Hall sex scandal during confirmation hearing for state appointment.

Former San Diego City Manager John Lockwood “obviously sinned” by quietly authorizing payments to cover up a City Hall sex scandal and may face questions about his trustworthiness during confirmation hearings over his state appointment, a legislative leader said Monday.

Sen William A. Craven (R-Oceanside) said he believes it was wrong of Lockwood to decide not to tell Mayor Maureen O’Connor and the City Council about the $100,000 in disability payments he authorized shortly before retiring as city manager. He became director of the state Department of General Services on March 11.

Now, Craven--who has agreed to spearhead the Senate confirmation of Lockwood’s appointment--said questions about Lockwood’s trustworthiness “could very easily be raised” in reaction to his handling of the sex scandal, which involved San Diego Planning Director Richard Spaulding and Susan M. Bray, a senior planner. The Democratic-controlled Senate has until March to confirm Lockwood’s selection to the $100,000-a-year post by Gov. Pete Wilson, or he will be forced to give up the job.

“I think it would be a fair question in a general sense,” Craven said. “It’s just one of those things. One time is enough to say, ‘Well, you did it, you’ve obviously sinned.’ Just how much of a sin this is-- gravis, venial --it’s hard to say.

“I think he thought, ‘Well, I’ll take care of this, get it out of the way and then I’ll be out of the way and nobody’s ever going to know for the better,’ ” said Craven, a member of the powerful Senate Rules Committee.

“Unfortunately for him, it didn’t work out that way. I think he took a chance and lost.”

Despite the criticism, Craven said he has full confidence in Lockwood’s administrative abilities and plans to schedule a confirmation vote for the former city manager unless otherwise directed by Wilson.

Word of the scandal reverberated to Sacramento after weekend news stories disclosed that Lockwood and City Atty. John Witt approved the payments to Spaulding’s former lover after she threatened to bring a sexual harassment suit against the city. Although Spaulding is directly answerable to O’Connor and the council, Lockwood said he decided to keep them in the dark to spare the planning director’s family public humiliation.

A spokesman for Wilson said Monday that his office is “looking into the matter” of Lockwood’s involvement in the roiling scandal. “(We’re) just trying to dig out the facts,” said Wilson spokesman Bill Livingstone.

Meanwhile, a state Senate source told The Times that the former city manager could face “a tough time” before the five-member Senate Rules Committee, which must give preliminary approval on gubernatorial appointments before they are forwarded to the full Senate.

A spokesman for Senate President Pro Tempore David A. Roberti (D-Los Angeles), chairman of the Rules Committee, had no comment.

Reached late Monday in San Francisco, where he was on state business, Lockwood said he would step down rather than face the embarrassment of a serious confirmation challenge.

“If it were really going to be a difficult thing, I would never go forward. I would not put the governor in that position at all,” said Lockwood, who worked as a city administrator under Wilson while Wilson was mayor.

“If a group of people are going to use that decision as a basis for not hiring you, I don’t think I want to work for them,” he said.

Short of a brutal political showdown, however, Lockwood said, he would welcome official inquiries about his handling of the Spaulding affair. “I would love to have that issue come up during my confirmation. I certainly hope it does come up,” he said.

Lockwood said Monday that senators will discover that, while he may have exceeded his administrative authority by keeping the matter from council members, he did nothing illegal in approving the stress disability payments without informing them. City managers have had the sole power to approve the claims for more than 25 years, he said.

His reluctance to inform council members about their own employee, he said, grew out of a series of meetings two years ago, when he pleaded with the council to stop leaking to the press details of legal and personnel matters discussed in executive sessions.

“I sat right there and looked everyone in the eye and said, ‘There are things I’m not going to be able to bring to you if the leaks don’t stop,’ ” Lockwood said. “And they didn’t stop.”

So after Lockwood confronted Spaulding about the sexual harassment claim in January, he said, he didn’t want to tell O’Connor and council members about a relationship he believed was an “anomaly” involving their planning director.

Briefing council members, he said, would virtually guarantee “terrible heartbreak and possible irreparable damage” to Spaulding’s children, who would be subjected to public humiliation.

“It was . . . a particular time in his life,” Lockwood said. “I was convinced that there was going to be no recurrence of that kind of thing. You can be a robotic bureaucrat, dot every ‘i’ and cross every ‘t’ and do everything you are supposed to do, but I can’t live that way.

“I recognized that it was probably a 50-50 shot that it would be found out,” he said, adding, “I had to come down on the human side and not the bureaucratic side.”

But if Spaulding were single, Lockwood said, he would have acted differently. “If this would have been some bachelor department head, and the fact situation was the same, I would say, ‘Hey, either you tell the council or I will.’ ”

In Sacramento, Craven said he considered Lockwood’s handling of the Spaulding matter to be a “very, very unusual move on his part.”

“I’m sure things like that have been done in cities and counties throughout the state of California for years that never got the attention of anyone,” Craven said. “I don’t think this is the first time this ever happened. . . . It doesn’t make it right. It’s wrong, and I’m really surprised that he did that.”

As director of the large state department, Lockwood heads 21 offices, a $500-million annual budget and 4,000 employees responsible for awarding contracts, procurement, and building and maintaining state buildings. The General Services Department also runs the state police, handles administrative hearings and manages the volumes of state records.