Tickets to Ineffectiveness : Three Anaheim city councilmen accept too many free Disneyland passes

Important--very important--decisions are in the offing in Anaheim, which last December was chosen as site of a major new Walt Disney Co. theme park in Southern California. Right now, however, three of the five members of Anaheim’s City Council--a majority--have grossly undercut their ability to serve the people who elected them.

Mayor Fred Hunter and Councilmen Irv Pickler and Bob Simpson have disclosed that last year they regularly arranged for friends and associates to get free tickets to Disneyland. The result: All three may have exceeded state law in the cash value of gifts they can receive while still being able to vote on issues concerning the donor. The councilmen argue that only a handful of the tickets were for “personal” use and thus the rest should not count as gifts. But obtaining tickets for others clearly is of benefit to themselves. Pickler even said he considered the tickets one of the council’s “perks.”

The state Fair Political Practices Commission is expected to make a ruling on the issue in about three weeks. Meanwhile, Disneyland and Anaheim officials are heavily lobbying the FPPC for a favorable ruling, which an FPPC official indicated may fall into a “gray area.”

Gray? Let Disneyland, not City Hall, dispense the free tickets. Hunter, Pickler and Simpson either personally arranged or had their staffs arrange to get tickets from Disneyland, which, so far as anyone knows, never refused. Hunter accepted 170 tickets, Pickler 98 and Simpson 24. At $27.50 each, that clearly puts each well over the state’s $250 annual limit for gifts.

In prior years, these ticket gifts hardly mattered because Disney needed little from the City Council. Now it’s different. The proposed $3-billion expansion would require the city to make a huge investment in transportation, parking and other facilities.

Environmental studies and other expansion-related issues are expected to start coming before the City Council in the next few months. But will there be a majority that can even vote on them?

That possibility has been jeopardized by the council’s ticket fiasco.