Council to Try to Get Spaulding to Repay Money : Scandal: The council met in private, despite pledges to hold open discussion on the sex harassment case. Attorneys advised the closed meeting.

Meeting in private despite promises of a full public hearing, the San Diego City Council agreed Monday to determine whether the city can recoup $100,000 from former Planning Director Robert Spaulding for the sexual harassment settlement secretly paid to one of his employees.

After meeting behind closed doors for three hours, the council also decided to seek to discipline city officials involved in the settlement and to develop new policies to keep a secret payout from occurring again.

The actions reflected a day of frustration for council members who had wanted a public airing of the circumstances of the secret settlement but acquiesced to the advice of attorneys who told them they had to discuss it secretly. The chance of getting repayment from Spaulding, for example, was regarded privately by city officials as slight.

In other developments Monday, former City Manager John Lockwood for the first time expressed second thoughts about the decision he had made to keep the settlement secret. And Josiah Neeper, the attorney chosen by the council to get to the bottom of the case, suggested that a variety of city rules were broken in the way the settlement occurred.

The council’s decision followed the three-hour closed meeting Monday with Neeper, appointed to investigate the particulars of the city’s payment. It was approved in March by Lockwood and made to former Planning Department employee Susan M. Bray.

Bray had filed a sexual harassment claim against the city after a two-year affair with Spaulding, which he has told the council was consensual, according to city officials.

But the council, despite a meeting Monday that was billed as a full airing of the case so far, released few details after the lengthy session. Members met in private after Neeper warned that either Bray or Spaulding could sue for breach of confidentiality.

Several council members expressed frustration that they could not now discuss the agreement.

“That’s what is so frustrating to us now,” Deputy Mayor Bob Filner said. “We want to have that open discussion as much as anyone, but apparently we are prohibited from doing so.”

Mayor Maureen O’Connor announced that the council was unanimous in its decision to attempt to get the $100,000 back from Spaulding.

Calling the charges “very serious in nature,” O’Connor also said the council instructed her and Neeper to make recommendations related to possible punishments and to develop a new set of policies that would keep similar secret payments from occurring without notifying the council.

“Some rules have been broken,” Councilman Ron Roberts said after the closed session.

With Lockwood retired from the city and working for state government in Sacramento, Spaulding already out of a job and Witt independently elected, it was unclear who might face punishment.

“I’m gone, and I’m the one who made the unilateral decision,” Lockwood said from Sacramento Monday. “Mr. Spaulding had nothing to do with approving the payment. I approved the payment.”

Calling it “a good business deal for the city,” Lockwood approved a $100,000 settlement for Bray without council approval by making sure the initial payment fell $5 below the financial threshold needed to gain council acceptance.

Days after word of the secret payment surfaced and a public furor resulted, the council fired Spaulding and appointed Neeper, a respected local attorney, to examine in detail how the payment transpired.

Neeper on Monday would not even acknowledge publicly the existence of a settlement in the Spaulding-Bray case but spoke hypothetically about a case with the identical factual scenario.

In response to reporters’ questions about such a case, Neeper said that the three-year payout to Bray violated the city’s two-year limit on stress disability payments.

He also said that structuring the deal by drawing on two different sets of funds appeared to be improper, and that those who failed to notify the council about the payments also may have failed to meet their obligations.

For the first time Monday, Lockwood said he now has some regrets about the matter.

“Had I known that some of these names of city employees are being drawn into this, I wouldn’t have done it, in hindsight,” he said, specifically mentioning Witt and Personnel Director Rich Snapper.

But he stood by his decision not to tell any of the council members or O’Conner, even though Assistant City Atty. Curtis Fitzpatrick suggested to Lockwood that he should tell the mayor.

“I wasn’t going to pick among my nine bosses,” he said. “Either I was going to tell nine, or I wasn’t going to tell anybody. I didn’t just fire from the hip on this. I had two months to think about it.”

The closed session did nothing to dispel fears that the truth behind the matter may never be fully known. At the outset of Monday’s meeting, Neeper moved quickly in asking the City Council and mayor to join him behind closed doors.

“Imust regretfully inform you that I have conducted the investigation, and I am 100% satisfied that I must request an executive session,” Neeper said, alluding to the state law that allows closed meetings by public agencies under special circumstances.

O’Connor said the executive session was being held to discuss potential litigation, presumably from either Spaulding or Bray.

While the meeting was conducted in a room just outside the main council chambers, Tim Taylor, an attorney representing the San Diego Union and Tribune, knocked on the door, entered and argued that the meeting should be open to the public.

Attorneys for the city informed Taylor that the council would decide the issue after its closed meeting had ended.

Taylor said there was no basis for holding the meeting in private because the city had come to an approved legal settlement with Bray.

Spaulding could not be reached for comment Monday.