Tucker Agrees to Pay $10,000 Campaign Fine : Politics: The assemblyman violated the law by using election funds to rent a Sacramento apartment.

In what he calls a costly lesson, Assemblyman Curtis Tucker Jr. (D-Inglewood) has agreed to pay a $10,000 fine for violating state political reform laws by spending campaign funds for personal use.

As part of an accord announced Tuesday, the state Fair Political Practices Commission said Tucker had improperly used his campaign kitty to rent a Sacramento apartment.

Tucker, 38, also agreed that by the end of the year, he would repay the $6,650 in rent payments his campaign committee made for the apartment.

The settlement between Tucker and the commission must be approved by the agency’s commissioners, who are to consider the matter March 4. Their approval is expected.

“I just look at it as a $10,000 learning experience,” Tucker said in an interview. He added that it was a “$10,000 lesson in the fine points of the law. I don’t think what I did was unethical.”

In an exhibit attached to the stipulated agreement, the commission staff said that at the same time Tucker was paying the rent, he also received “an Assembly per diem for housing, which he spent on other expenses.”

In 1990, those payments amounted to $88 a day for living expenses, according to the Assembly Rules Committee.

Tucker blamed his mistake, in part, on having first won his legislative office in a special election in February, 1989, which meant he arrived in Sacramento after that year’s session was under way.

“I missed all the freshmen orientation and meetings, and I guess everyone automatically assumed that I knew” the law, Tucker told The Times.

He said it wasn’t until he later attended a legislative ethics course that he realized that the apartment payments were improper.

But in its case against Tucker, the commission staff cited provisions of the law that did not take effect until Jan. 1, 1990--nearly a year after Tucker’s election. One section of the law says, “Campaign funds shall not be used for payment or reimbursement for the lease of real property.”

Despite these sections tightening the law, the commission staff said, Tucker paid rent for all of 1990 on the suburban Sacramento apartment leased in his name. From January through March of 1990, Tucker’s sister and brother-in-law also lived in the apartment, according to the commission documents.

In the documents, the agency chides Tucker for failing to know the law, saying that as a lawmaker at the time the personal use law was enacted, he should have been aware of it.

Tucker could have been slapped with a maximum $12,000 fine for the six violations cited by the commission staff. But the staff noted several factors to lessen the penalty, saying that Tucker had no history of violating the Political Reform Act and had cooperated with the commission’s investigation.

In addition, Tucker disclosed each of the rent payments on his campaign statements filed with the secretary of state’s office, according to the staff report.

“The campaign statement disclosure supports Tucker’s claim that he was unaware that this use of campaign funds violated the personal use law,” the staff concluded.

Said Tucker: “Clearly, it was a misunderstanding on my part.”

Tucker’s 51st Assembly district includes all or parts of Hawthorne, Inglewood, Lawndale, Lennox and Torrance, as well as parts of South Los Angeles.

The special election that Tucker won in 1989 was called following the death of his father, who had served in the Assembly since 1974. The younger Tucker easily won reelection in 1990 and ’92.