Mayor Slams City-Paid Trips to Super Bowl : Junkets: Much-traveled Jess Hughston says sending 10 city officials and employees to Minneapolis to observe operations there duplicates job he did in Tampa last year.

With the regularity of the passing of the seasons, somebody in Pasadena grumbles about city-financed travel expenses.

The latest blast comes from Mayor Jess Hughston, who said this week that he doesn’t see the point of spending money to send 10 city officials and employees to Minneapolis for Super Bowl XXVI. The ostensible purpose of the trip is to help the city plan for Super Bowl XXVII, which will be held next year in the Rose Bowl.

“It doesn’t make sense to me,” said Hughston, who has done some globe-trotting of his own in recent years at city expense.

The expenses of most of the delegation, which includes two council members, two Rose Bowl officials, four Police Department representatives, a Fire Department representative and an assistant city manager, will be paid out of a city Rose Bowl travel fund, which is funded by proceeds from Rose Bowl events. A finance department spokesman said the costs of the trip will not be known until the travelers return and file expense reports.

City Councilman William Thomson decided to pay his own expenses.

“I’m paying my way just to avoid this very issue,” said Thomson, who was criticized in 1990 for taking a $4,000 trip to Italy to lobby for the 1994 World Cup soccer championships.

Thomson added that he felt that Hughston should be one of the last to criticize city travelers.

“I find it perplexing to be criticized by a person who’s been to Japan, Armenia and Las Vegas at public expense in the past six months,” Thomson said.

In a survey last year of council members’ travel expenses during the previous two years, Hughston was the biggest spender, having taken 24 trips at a cost to the city of more than $22,000.

Since then, Hughston has traveled to Kirovakan, in what was then Soviet Armenia, to establish a sister-city relationship, and attended a sister-city celebration in Mishima, Japan. He also attended the National League of Cities conference in Las Vegas in November.

But, Hughston said, the trip to Minneapolis to gather information about running a Super Bowl event was duplicated effort. He said that he and Councilman Chris Holden had gone to Super Bowl XXV in Tampa, Fla., last year to gather just such information.

“We went for the sole purpose of being acquainted with how they operate those kinds of things,” said Hughston, who despite his critical remarks has done nothing to block expenses for the city Super Bowl delegation.

The mayor said the city had the additional advantage of having Rose Bowl general manager Greg Asbury on staff. Asbury takes an annual leave each January to work as a security coordinator for the Super Bowl.

Both Thomson and Chris Holden, the other councilman who will travel to Minneapolis, defended the city delegation, saying Pasadena had a special obligation to observe a Minneapolis program being tried this year to involve more minorities in the event.

Pasadena wrested the selection from Phoenix, after Arizona refused to recognize Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday as a state holiday. Pasadena persuaded the National Football League to choose the Rose Bowl for next year’s championship game because of the city’s demographic diversity.

“Arizona defaulted as a site, and there are a lot of sensitivities around race,” Holden said. “One of the keys to our selection was diversity, and we want to continue to build on that.”

Holden said that he would be paying special attention to efforts by Minneapolis to include minorities in the Super Bowl activities, which have been criticized as being oriented to those who can pay the high price of a Super Bowl ticket and travel, excluding members of communities in which the games are staged.

Holden said that city officials would also be paying close attention to efforts to reap profits from the event.

“When the game was played here in the past, most of the money went out of the city,” Holden said. “Our real focus will be to keep the megabucks in the community.” The last time Pasadena hosted the Super Bowl was in 1987.

Assistant City Manager Ed Sotelo, who will be another member of the city delegation, said that he was concerned primarily with public safety issues. “With things like emergencies and traffic control, it’s critical to get first-hand information,” he said.

Some of the officials who will go to Minneapolis were hired by the city since the last Pasadena Super Bowl, Sotelo added.

Hughston was supported by Councilman William Paparian, who has refused to take trips at city expense during his five years on the council. Paparian, who has characterized city-financed travel expenses as “frivolous freeloading,” was the only member of the council who did not attend the National League of Cities convention last year.

“Why send people there (Minneapolis) to see how it’s done?” Paparian said. “We’ve done Super Bowls before.”