Conflict-of-Interest Probe Hinders Reed’s Endeavors

For more than a year, the State Bar of California has been investigating a conflict-of-interest complaint against Dana W. Reed involving charges that he worked for both sides of a 1989 municipal ballot measure in Riverside County to legalize card casinos.

Cathedral City’s Mayor Pro Tem George Hardie said in his complaint to the bar that he hired Reed to work in favor of his ballot measure only to find a few months later that the Costa Mesa attorney was researching the same issue for an opponent of the plan.

Reed claims he never worked for either side of the card-casino ballot measure.

However, just before the ballot measure failed in October, 1989, the bar launched its investigation.

Almost a year later, last August, attorneys for the bar wrote to Hardie: “We have concluded that there exists reasonable cause for the initiation of a formal disciplinary proceeding. . . . If no disposition can be reached between the state bar and Mr. Reed, (we will) forward the matter to the Office of Trials for formal prosecution.”

Since then, investigators for the bar have questioned Reed about the issue last December, but there has been no additional comment about the status of the case. Reed said recently that he has not heard from the bar since that meeting.

Susan Scott, a spokeswoman for the bar in San Francisco, also said recently that the bar cannot confirm or comment on an ongoing investigation. She added that there has not been any action taken against Reed so far.

Reed told investigators that Hardie hired him to work on his City Council campaign, not to plan the ballot measure. Reed acknowledged that he was later employed by a client who was opposed to the ballot measure, but he said that organization decided not to become involved in the election when it appeared the proposal would lose.

Reed said he is confident that the issue will be resolved in his favor. But the investigation has left a cloud over his career that has caused him distress, and it raised problems last March when he ran in a special election for the state Senate.

“It has caused a fair amount of questions to be asked,” Reed said recently. “It certainly hurt in (campaign) fund raising, no question about that. People believe where there’s smoke there’s fire . . . and there’s an awful lot of smoke there, but there’s no fire.”