Lawyer Hired to Untangle Story of Secret Settlement

Within minutes after being named special counsel to investigate the sex-and-hush-money scandal that has rocked City Hall, Josiah Neeper displayed the personal characteristics that prompted the San Diego City Council to select him Tuesday for the ticklish job.

As he left the council chambers, Neeper was surrounded by a phalanx of reporters who questioned him about how he planned to probe the secret $100,000 settlement awarded to a former city planner who filed a sexual harassment claim against the city following an affair with former Planning Director Robert Spaulding.

Asked whether the former planner, Susan M. Bray, has contacted the city regarding potential litigation over the recent revelations, Neeper smiled slightly and responded: “I can’t reply to that. I purposely do not reply to that.”

Straightforward, discreet, concise, “squeaky honest” --these are the words colleagues and acquaintances use to describe the 61-year-old lawyer who has been handed the unenviable task of sorting out by next week who knew what when about the burgeoning controversy that cost Spaulding his job and has tainted the reputations of several other former or current top city officials.

“His integrity, his sensitivity and his brightness probably make him the perfect person for the job,” said Frederick Crowell, one of Neeper’s partners in the local law firm of Gray Cary Ames & Frye, where he has worked for 32 years. “If I had to create a job description for someone to step into these difficult circumstances, it would describe him.”

A longtime labor negotiation consultant for the city, Neeper will serve as “fact finder and special counsel for the council” in determining the chronology of events that led to the secret $100,000 settlement, Mayor Maureen O’Connor explained. In particular, Neeper will examine whether then-City Manager John Lockwood, City Atty. John Witt and other city officials violated the City Charter by settling Bray’s sexual harassment claim without informing the council.

“We had to go outside City Hall to get the independence needed,” O’Connor said. “The problem is, everyone here--the manager’s office, the attorney’s office, the personnel and labor people--was involved. And the ones who should have been involved--the mayor and the council--were kept in the dark, and so was the public.”

Though the political sensitivity and intense public scrutiny attendant to the special counsel’s job would be sufficient cause for many to shy away from it, Neeper said in an interview that he welcomes the assignment as “an opportunity to serve the city I love best.”

A Philadelphia native, Neeper moved to San Diego in 1947 after graduating from high school. After graduating from San Diego State College, now SDSU, Neeper received his law degree at UCLA, and returned to San Diego to join Gray Cary in 1959.

Married and the father of two grown children, Neeper lives with his wife just north of Balboa Park. He is active in a wide range of professional and civic activities, including serving as counsel to the University of San Diego’s Board of Trustees and the San Diego Zoological Society, on the board of governors of the Mericos Eye Institute, as chairman of SDSU’s Presidents’ Roundtable, and as a trustee of the UCLA Foundation, Old Globe Theatre and San Diego Theatre League Foundation.

An expert in labor management relations, Neeper, while still in private practice was the city’s principal labor contract negotiator in the 1970s. Since San Diego developed its own in-house labor negotiation team, Neeper--a member of the city of Los Angeles Employee Relations Board--has continued to serve as a paid consultant, providing what he characterized as “back-room advice” to the council and city manager.

During his extensive work for the city, Neeper, who will be paid his normal hourly retainer fee for the current investigation, has come to know Lockwood and some of the other city officials whose conduct he will be asked to evaluate. Neither the council nor Neeper himself, however, expressed concern that that familiarity could impair his objectivity.

Known as much for his understated yet forceful style as he is for his trademark homburg, Neeper is widely described as someone whose unquestioned integrity and gentlemanly manner often help to defuse the tensions and bridge the negotiating gaps common to labor talks.

“He tries to work more in a collaborative atmosphere than in the old adversarial style,” City Manager Jack McGrory said. “I’ve never seen him yell or scream, but he’s very firm and very direct in driving home what he feels is a fair, equitable position.”

“He has the ability to take complicated issues and put them into terms that can be easily understood and acted upon in a quick, rational manner,” added John Kaheny, who worked with Neeper as the city’s labor attorney. “That’s not always easy in something as inflammatory as labor disputes can be.”

Though his current task will place Neeper in a more visible role than he is accustomed to, this will not be the first occasion in which he has stepped into a major public controversy.

In the early 1980s, Neeper played a crucial behind-the-scenes role in helping resolve a San Diego County sheriff’s deputies’ strike, carrying messages between the two sides that eventually persuaded each to moderate its position and produced a settlement.

“All lawyers really are is high-paid problem solvers,” Crowell said. “But he’s one of the best. If the problem was mundane . . . they wouldn’t need him.”

Neeper said his primary focus will be on “the procedures and process involved in the settlement . . . and the appropriateness of what occurred.”

“The council wished to have someone do the report in whom it can put some level of trust,” Neeper said. “I’m honored to be asked. This is an important matter and there are important questions to answer.”

After interviewing the principals in the case--at least those willing to talk--Neeper plans to present his findings to the council at a public meeting Monday and to offer recommendations on how similar problems could be avoided in the future.

One subject likely to be reexamined as part of that review, council members said, is a city policy allowing the city manager to make expenditures of less than $20,000 without informing the council. By deciding to pay former planner Bray $19,995 shortly before he retired in March, with nearly $80,000 to be paid over the next three years, Lockwood stayed below the threshold that would have required council approval.

“Beyond sorting this out, maybe the best thing Mr. Neeper could do is tell us how to prevent anything like this from happening again,” O’Connor said.