Political Connections of Doughers Draw Scrutiny : Probe: Critics say brothers who own 12 Orange County mobile-home parks ‘know how to work system.’

Anaheim Mayor Fred Hunter remembers the meeting as no less than his “political baptism.”

It was 1984, and Hunter--then a little-known City Council candidate in Anaheim--was summoned to meet with local mobile-home industry leaders to see if they might pump some money into his cash-starved campaign.

For half an hour, the group grilled him on his background and his political views on rent control and a host of other business-related issues. Park owner Gerard J. Dougher led the questioning.

“Gerry appeared to be the boss, the ringleader,” Hunter recalled recently. “I just came away from the meeting dumbfounded; I didn’t know if I wanted to get involved in politics at all after that.”

The meeting illustrates how Dougher and his family have married business and politics while building a multimillion-dollar network of a dozen mobile-home parks in Orange County.

The Doughers have used a variety of means to foster political connections, hosting lunches with a state regulator, hiring a $4,000-a-month consultant who has also worked for local lawmakers, and donating thousands of dollars to city and county campaigns, according to documents and more than 40 interviews.

Gerard’s brother and business partner, Donald J. Dougher, said additional family donations have come routinely in $99 increments, just a dollar short of the amount that state law requires politicians to identify individually. Family members have alleged that Gerard Dougher instructed them to deliver such checks to him, leaving the payee blank, for Gerard to distribute to local candidates.

Sources estimate that family members have donated at least $5,800 in recent years to local candidates through this technique. While giving donations in $99 increments is legal, political finance lawyers say “bundling”-- collecting contributions from a number of sources and then delivering them en masse--could violate state law.

Now, the Doughers’ political connections are drawing scrutiny. The FBI and the district attorney’s office are probing the family’s relationship with Orange County Supervisor Don R. Roth over allegations that Roth may have traded gifts for political favors. The Times Orange County Edition reported last month that the two-term supervisor had failed to disclose--as required by state law--that the Doughers had given him three trips to Santa Catalina Island and what amounted to an $8,500 interest-free loan.

Following the breakup of his marriage in mid-1990, Roth stayed at an apartment at the Doughers’ Ponderosa Mobile Home Park in Anaheim, deferring the $500 a month rent until he left, he said. Roth’s records indicate that he paid the Doughers $8,500 last January for 17 months back rent, including utilities.

That same month, Roth voted with the four other supervisors to approve a $5-million condominium project on land owned by the Doughers in Midway City, although the Planning Commission had previously rejected the development.

Roth’s disclosure forms do reflect that dating back to his days as an Anaheim city councilman, he has received $6,550 in political contributions from the Doughers, most of it coming during his years as a county supervisor.

Roth refused to comment for this report but has previously denied any impropriety in his dealings with the Doughers.

Donald Dougher II, 35, said that while he does not know Don Roth, some family members have made it a point to ally themselves with politicians who oppose rent control and hold pro-business positions that might affect their parks.

“If you put politicians in power who don’t want rent control, more power to you,” he said in an interview.

Gerard Dougher, 70, a former labor relations specialist for Ford Motor Co., has repeatedly declined to discuss his company or his relationship with Roth. “I don’t want any part of it,” he told The Times.

His attorney, George S. Cary, said Dougher would not answer any questions because “the reporting on this whole case has been irresponsible.”

For his part, Donald Dougher, 65, predicted that ongoing questions about “political crap” in the family’s relations with Roth, 71, will not hurt the Doughers, but he acknowledged that it has brought unwanted publicity.

“Who needs publicity?” he asked, in a recent interview from his home in Newport Beach. “Not unless you’re a movie star or something.”

Mobile-Home Park Network Amassed From what began with a small patch of land in Brea more than two decades ago, the Dougher brothers have built one of the largest mobile-home park operations in Orange County, with 12 parks in Anaheim, Brea, Costa Mesa, Fountain Valley, Laguna Hills, Midway City and Orange.

When the Dougher brothers began amassing their park network in the early 1970s after moving from Michigan, Orange County’s real estate market appealed to them. “We liked the area--it had a future,” Donald Dougher said.

Despite a steady stream of lawsuits and tenants’ complaints brought against the family since then, the Dougher parks have done well financially, according to Donald Dougher and others familiar with the operations.

Family members declined to discuss details of the operations’ finances, but lawyers for several tenant groups who have sued the Doughers estimate the value of their Orange County parks at more than $60 million, with estimated monthly revenue of at least $1.5 million.

An estimated 3,000 residents at Dougher parks generally pay $500 to $700 monthly for the plots of land on which their homes sit, according to tenant lawyers.

Clarke Fairbrother, president of the Manufactured Housing Educational Trust in Orange County, a mobile-home trade association that Gerard Dougher used to head, said the Doughers “have a reputation for running nice, well-maintained mobile-home parks, and their rents reflect the fact that they’re on the upper end of the market.”

The two family patriarchs, Donald and Gerard, have worked closely through the years, bringing their wives and their five grown children into the business as well, to share in the finances and operations of the parks.

But a rift has now divided the family, and the brothers are suing each other in Orange County Superior Court over control of the family’s business, trading charges of embezzlement, fraud and money laundering. Most of their parks are being held in receivership pending the outcome of the litigation.

Donald Dougher alleges in court papers filed this month that Gerard secretly siphoned extensive funds from corporations that they jointly controlled and into others held by Gerard’s three children.

Donald alleges that Gerard’s family used much of this money to pay for furniture, a car stereo, a speeding ticket and even wife Dorothy Dougher’s trip to West Germany with a delegation led by Supervisor Roth in 1990 to explore train technologies that could be used in Orange County.

Several former employees say that although ownership of Dougher companies is spread among at least eight family members, it is Gerard Dougher who has essentially run the parks from the kitchen table of his home in the exclusive and gated community of Emerald Bay in Laguna Beach. He even handled such details as interviewing prospective tenants himself, these employees say.

In a court declaration given recently as part of the lawsuit between the two brothers, fired executive James Kosik maintained that Gerard Dougher “thrived on secrecy and chaos and constantly played one . . . employee against another.”

Gerard, meanwhile, has denied the allegations and has counterattacked in court, alleging that Donald tried “to take over the day-to-day operations of the parks in a coup-like fashion” and used false pretenses to seize records from Gerard’s home last December under a court order.

Yet Donald downplays the dispute. “I don’t think it’s anything major,” he said in an interview. “It hasn’t been any great emotional thing. It’s just something that needs to be taken care of.”

Reasons for Their Success Debated It is this same no-nonsense, business-like approach that supporters say the Doughers have brought to their operation, as they have purchased older parks in Orange County, refurbished them and made them upscale. These supporters say the family’s success has more to do with hard work and business sense than political clout or influence with local leaders.

“This idea of (the Doughers) as an insider, high-rolling crowd . . . that’s ridiculous,” said Glen Greener, who worked as a political consultant for the family until earlier this year. “They’ve never been a part of that world.”

Critics offer a different view.

“The Doughers certainly have a political savvy and know how to work the system,” said Sandra L. Genis, a Costa Mesa councilwoman who unsuccessfully opposed the expansion of a Dougher-owned park in her city in 1990.

“They know who to hire to push their projects,” she said. “And they know how to maintain (political) contacts that other people just don’t have.”

Gerard Dougher’s wife Dorothy has also acknowledged in court records that she considers it important to maintain political ties to the community.

Attending local political functions helps the family “keep in touch with all the council people,” Dorothy Dougher said in a deposition she gave earlier this year in a tenants’ lawsuit against the Doughers.

“It’s good public relations,” she said.

Interviews and documents show that the scope of the Doughers’ public relations efforts with local officials has extended beyond Roth:

* The state last month disciplined Arthur Stillwell, a state housing inspector who enforces housing regulations at mobile-home parks in Orange County, for violations of government codes in his dealings with the Doughers, among other problems. He was accused of displaying “dishonesty” and possible bias.

Stillwell, who had installed mobile homes at Dougher parks and elsewhere when he worked in the private sector before 1985, has since done more than 300 inspections at Dougher parks for the state Department of Housing and Community Development to check for compliance with health and safety regulations.

State housing officials suspended him without pay for three days in part for allowing Dorothy Dougher to take him to lunch at least five times--in violation of department policy.

At one of those lunches this year, Dorothy Dougher gave him a legal declaration describing Costa Mesa Mobile Estates as “a well-maintained park (that is) kept in good condition and repair,” according to officials and court papers. After he made minor revisions, Stillwell signed the document, identifying himself as a state inspector. The Doughers are now using the declaration to fight a tenant lawsuit.

State officials said Stillwell should not have taken sides in a lawsuit as he did. His relationship with the Doughers “raises the appearance of favoritism and an improper relationship between the enforcing agency and the entities it regulates,” state housing officials wrote in a reprimand. Stillwell is appealing.

In a telephone interview, Stillwell said: “I have no relationship with the Doughers.” When asked about the lunches with Dorothy Dougher, he told a reporter to “contact my office for any further information” and hung up.

* For years, the Doughers have been one of the strongest voices in Anaheim in successfully urging the City Council to oppose rent control at mobile-home parks, according to public officials who have both supported and opposed rent control.

The Doughers have six parks in Anaheim, and it was there that the Doughers focused their political donations. A Times computer-assisted analysis found that family members and corporations they control have donated nearly $11,000 to Anaheim council members since 1984.

Former Councilman E. Llewellyn Overholt Jr., who consistently opposed rent control when he was on the council through 1986, said the Doughers were always “strongly represented” before city officials. Family members worked with industry leaders to host informational lunches for council people and to help fill council hearings with rent-control opponents, Overholt said.

Overholt said during his tenure on the council from 1978 through 1986, the Doughers were close allies of Roth. And he recalled that Roth often socialized with influential people in the community.

“It was no secret that he (Roth) was being wined and dined. They (Don and ex-wife Jackie) were aggressively seeking status. They sought to be involved with wealthy people,” Overholt said.

For more than a decade, council members resisted efforts to put a rent-control initiative before the voters, with the council rejecting that idea most recently in 1987. Last year, a measure did make it to the ballot after more than 20,000 signatures were collected in a petition drive, but the proposal was defeated by city voters.

* The Doughers have contributed at least $24,848 to candidates for office in the several cities where they have parks, as well as to campaigns of the County Board of Supervisors, which holds jurisdiction over Dougher parks in or near Laguna Hills, Fountain Valley and Midway City. The contributions most often come through companies the Doughers control.

For instance, campaign records show that in Laguna Hills, incorporated as a city in 1991, the family moved quickly to establish ties with newly elected council members, whose sphere of influence now includes the Doughers’ Laguna Hills Mobile Estates.

At issue for the Doughers is whether their park, on county land bordering Laguna Hills, may be annexed into the city. Within five months after the cityhood vote in March, 1991, a Dougher investment company had made $500 donations to four of the five people elected to serve on the new city’s council. One member-elect got another $475 a few months later.

* The Doughers have been involved in two mobile-home industry Political Action Committees that have donated tens of thousands of dollars to local and county candidates in recent years. Gerard Dougher was president of the Manufactured Housing Education Trust in the mid-1980s, and his wife Dorothy served as treasurer in 1986.

At that time, Gerard worked with the trust’s executive director, Vicky Talley, the wife of then-Anaheim City Manager William O. Talley. She and Gerard together routinely interviewed political candidates in Anaheim, Costa Mesa and elsewhere to determine which candidates would receive PAC contributions. More recently, the Doughers have been affiliated with the Western Mobilehome Assn., a Sacramento-based industry trade group.

* And from about 1987 until earlier this year, the Doughers retained political consultant Greener of Irvine on government and public relations matters.

Critics focus particular attention on this relationship because Greener’s firm has also done consulting and campaign work for Costa Mesa Councilman Peter F. Buffa and former councilman Orville Amburgey. Dougher family members and their companies have contributed more than $2,600 to their campaigns since 1986, records show. Each councilman voted in favor of allowing the Dougher park to expand from 100 to 113 spots, a proposal that passed by a 3-2 margin in 1990.

“There are some odd connections as far as I’m concerned,” said Costa Mesa Councilwoman Genis, who recalled that she was surprised to see Greener come before the council on behalf of the Doughers when he had also done consulting work for both Amburgey and Buffa.

“It’s an awkward situation,” she said. “I had some concern that the impartiality of the votes could be compromised.”

Both Buffa and Amburgey said their relationship with Greener had nothing to do with their voting in favor of the Dougher expansion.

Amburgey said in an interview that he voted for the expansion because he was impressed by the Doughers as “caring people” willing to help their tenants. The park looks “a thousand percent better” than before Gerard’s son Brian bought it in 1985, when it was called Costa Mesa Trailer Town, he said, adding, “It was like a slum then--real rundown.”

The council’s approval of the expansion came despite concerns from city fire officials that the park is too crowded and that its close confines, single entrance and narrow streets made it inaccessible to emergency vehicles.

“Emergency access is unavailable to responding units at this time,” Suzanne Freeman, a fire protection analyst, said in a June, 1990, memo to Costa Mesa Fire Marshal Thomas R. Macduff. “Construction of the manufactured homes at such a close proximity presents an immediate fire hazard.”

The safety concerns apparently continue today: In a deposition earlier this year in the tenants’ lawsuit, Macduff said the physical setup at the park “is going to spread the fire so quickly that (in an individual unit fire) we have a good likelihood of losing three (homes) instead of one.”

For his part, Greener saw no problem in representing the Doughers and members of the City Council. “I’m not sure what the problem would be with that. Like many other consultants, I do both political advising and government relations for businesses,” he said.

Some Tenants Upset With Management The Times visited several Dougher parks and interviewed about a dozen tenants in the past month. Some Dougher tenants say the fire hazard is only one of their worries. While some tenants said they liked their park, most said they were dissatisfied with the management.

“There is absolutely no negotiating with the Doughers,” said Mary Willhite, who lives in the Laguna Hills Mobile Estates. “With them, money talks.”

Other residents complained of street lights left broken for weeks, parking problems and a lack of play space for children on the parks’ paved lots. Several said they felt “captive” to restrictive lease agreements that make it difficult for them to move, even though they say a growing number of vacant lots in some parks has depreciated the value of their homes.

Such complaints about the Doughers’ management of their parks have led to an array of lawsuits against the family.

Since 1976, family members and the companies they run have been sued 83 times in Orange County Superior Court by tenants, businesses and even each other--with 23 suits filed in 1991 alone.

The Doughers even got into a flap over a pole used by a war veteran to fly the American flag. The Doughers won a court order in 1988 that forced the veteran, who lived in their Fountain Valley park, to take down a 20-foot high pole that he had erected by his mobile home. Gerard Dougher declared the flagpole a public nuisance that broke park rules against “non-growing objects” in the ground.

Complaints about the Doughers have attracted the interest of local, state and federal governmental agencies as well.

In 1980, without acknowledging any guilt, the Doughers paid $50,000 to settle claims by the Orange County district attorney’s office that they had used “unfair and misleading” rental agreements in their parks, enforced unreasonable rules and charged fees for services that were never rendered.

Donald Dougher said the case was “a lot to do about nothing,” blaming it on a disgruntled tenant who triggered the investigation. However, a spokeswoman for the district attorney’s office described the settlement amount as “substantial” for a case of this kind.

In 1984, during an investigation into mobile-home park industry practices, the Orange County Grand Jury received more complaints about the Doughers than any other park operators, according to Murray M. Patton, then a grand jury member.

In its advisory report, the grand jury found that park owners often imposed “arbitrary and capricious” rules on tenants. The report also found “a pattern of harassment and excessive rental fees” in some cases, hurting the quality of life for many tenants.

But the final report did not name the Doughers or any other individual park operator, and the district attorney’s office did not take action against any parks as of the result of the grand jury investigation.

Then, in the summer of 1991, after failed negotiations, the U.S. attorney’s office sued the Dougher-controlled management company for discrimination, charging it with unlawfully refusing to refund guest and parking fees for a health worker who cared for a handicapped child at the Costa Mesa park.

The suit was dismissed in U.S. District Court before evidence was heard because the court found that the plaintiff failed to state a proper claim for relief. The woman is appealing the case.

Donald Dougher said he is confident the family can overcome the latest series of questions and the FBI and district attorney examinations of the family’s relationship with Roth. He said he is more confused than worried by the affair.

He added that his brother was the one closest to Roth, contending that he spoke with the supervisor only a few times at social and political functions.

“This political thing comes as as a real surprise,” Dougher said. “I can’t imagine any of this being important, because . . . I don’t even know the guy, and I don’t know how we became involved in any political crap.”

Times staff writer Mark Landsbaum and correspondent Frank Messina contributed to this report. COOPERATION AGREEMENT: Two members of Dougher family granted immunity. A33

Dougher Mobile Home Parks Members of the Dougher family and various trusts and partnerships controlled by family members own one mobile home park in Artesia in Los Angeles County and these 12 in Orange County:

Park Location Anaheim Harbor RV Park 1009 S. Harbor Blvd., Anaheim Anaheim Mobile Estates 3050 W. Ball Road, Anaheim Beach Bolsa Mobile Estates 15141 Beach Blvd., Midway City (unincorporated) Carriage Mobile Estates 201 W. Collins Ave., Orange Costa Mesa Mobile Estates 327 W. Wilson St., Costa Mesa Crestmont Mobile Estates 1051 Site Drive, Brea Fountain Valley Mobile 12062 Edinger Ave., Home Park (unincorporated) Laguna Hills Mobile 23301 Ridge Route Drive Estates (unincorporated) Ponderosa Travel Trailer 2337 S. Manchester Ave., Park Anaheim Ponderosa Mobile Estates 2300 S. Lewis St., Anaheim Rio Vista Mobile Estates 320 N. Park Vista, Anaheim Romneya Mobile Estates 600 W. Romneya Drive, Anaheim

Source: Orange County Superior Court documents

Dougher Campaign Giving Gerard and Donald Dougher, along with members of their families, control one of the most extensive chains of mobile home parks in Orange County. As the brothers expanded their business over the past two decades, they built relationships with county and local politicians. Their business and personal dealings with Supervisor Don R. Roth are the focus of an FBI inquiry and a district attorney’s investigation into whether Roth traded political favors for gifts.

A look at campaign contributions by the Doughers and firms they control, as reported by county and local candidates: Contributions From the Doughers and Firms They Control To Don R. Roth, while Anaheim councilman, supervisor or candidate, since 1984 Amount: $6,550 To other Board of Supervisors members and candidates since 1977

Candidate Amount Supervisor Roger R. Stanton $300 Supervisor Gaddi H. Vasquez 300 Supervisor Harriett M. Wieder 250 Supervisor Thomas F. Riley 150 Former supervisor Philip L. Anthony 125 Total without Roth $1,125

To other Anaheim City Council candidates since 1984

Candidate Amount Councilman Tom Daly $3,100 Councilman William D. Ehrle 2,750 Former councilwoman Miriam Kaywood 1,900 Councilman Irv Pickler 1,800 Former councilman Ben Bay 250 Council candidate Paul V. Bostwick 200 Total without Roth $10,000

To Brea City Council candidates since 1982

Candidate Amount Councilman Carrey J. Nelson $550 Former councilwoman Clarice A. Blamer 125 Total $675

To Costa Mesa City Council candidates since 1988

Candidate Amount Former councilman Orville Amburgey $1,898 Councilman Peter F. Buffa 725 Total $2,623

To Laguna Hills City Council candidates since 1990

Candidate Amount Councilman R. Craig Scott $975 Councilman Joel T. Lautenschleger 500 Councilwoman Melody Carruth 500 Councilman L. Allan Songstad Jr. 500 Total $2,475

To Orange City Council candidates since 1986

Candidate Amount Councilwoman Joanne Coontz $900 Councilman William G. Steiner 500 Total $1,400

Source: Campaign contribution statements filed by candidates with cities and county. Years vary because of different record-keeping policies in cities. Note: Laguna Hills was incorporated in 1991