Pursley Will Not be Charged With Financial Violations : Lancaster: Prosecutors say they can’t prove the ex-councilman’s infractions were deliberate.

Closing a 22-month-long review, Los Angeles County prosecutors said Friday they will not file misdemeanor criminal charges against former Lancaster City Councilman William Pursley for violations of conflict-of-interest and financial disclosure laws in 1989 and 1990.

The district attorney’s office said it would be impossible to prove Pursley intended to violate the law, making a conviction unlikely. And prosecutors said Pursley probably would not have faced a more severe penalty than the $16,000 fine already imposed by the state’s political watchdog agency.

“We did really weigh it very carefully,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Carol Straughn of the office’s special investigations division, which handles cases of alleged criminal misconduct by public officials. Straughn released an eight-page memo explaining the Pursley decision.

“I am pleased with their decision,” said the former councilman, a real estate agent who held office from 1989 until April, 1992. “It’s always a relief to get something like this behind you. It sort of is a closing chapter to all this,” he said.

Pursley, 64, had admitted the violations after they were reported by The Times and former Lancaster Planning Commissioner Fred Brodish, who filed a complaint with the state Fair Political Practices Commission.

In July, Pursley agreed to pay the FPPC a $16,000 fine to settle 10 administrative counts of violating the state’s Political Reform Act, three involving conflicts of interest and seven involving Pursley’s failure to fully disclose his economic interests.

The district attorney’s office reviewed those matters to determine whether Pursley also should face criminal charges. In recent years, county prosecutors have rarely filed such cases against politicians. And the office has had a mixed record in the few cases that have been filed.

The FPPC found that Pursley failed to disclose 48 items on his state-required 1989 statement of economic interests, including ownership of 16 properties, 13 sources of personal income, eight sources of loans or income to businesses, seven real estate commissions, two loans and two investments.

Straughn concluded that Pursley, in his filing, “was hardly the model of clarity and diligence that one would hope for in one’s elected officials.” But she added: “The oversights appear more like inadvertence and negligence rather than deliberate efforts to conceal facts.”

The most serious conflict involved his introducing and voting in June, 1990, on a measure to reduce a city street easement along a parcel owned by a business associate. The owner said that helped the sale, then in escrow, and Pursley received a $9,780 commission on the deal.

In deciding not to prosecute, Straughn said that the motion would have been passed by the council even if Pursley had abstained, that Pursley later donated $11,000 to three charities and that a judge probably would not have imposed a larger fine nor sentenced Pursley to jail.

The other two conflicts involved Pursley’s voting several times in 1989 and 1990 for a 559-home Kaufman & Broad Inc. project in west Lancaster. Months earlier, the developer bought land elsewhere from two Pursley partnerships for $6.7 million, and Pursley received a commission of $109,146.

Straughn wrote that Pursley’s votes “may have been more the result of confusion and ignorance” of conflict-of-interest laws. She concluded: “We do not think that a conviction of Mr. Pursley would subject him to penalties or punishment sufficiently beyond what he has already incurred.”