Free Hunting Trips a Yearly Event : Leisure: Engineering firm owner Don Greek invites people from various agencies--including Santa Margarita Water District--on excursions.

Each year, Don Greek sends out a general invitation asking hunting enthusiasts to join him for a few days of bagging elk or deer in Colorado or javelina in Arizona.

One particular year, Greek, who owns a local civil engineering firm, asked an old college classmate, Walter W. (Bill) Knitz, if he’d like to go on one of the trips.

Knitz, general manager of the Santa Margarita Water District that has provided Greek’s company with several contracts worth thousands of dollars, hadn’t been hunting in years and suggested that his assistant, Michael P. Lord, be invited instead.

A hunter since youth, Lord accepted the invitation two years in a row to join Greek and others in Canon City, Colo., just south of Colorado Springs.

The setting is a 7,000-acre cattle ranch owned by a friend of Greek’s, who supplements his income by allowing sportsmen to hunt on his land for a fee. A weeklong trip costs between $800 and $1,000, Greek said.

Lord reported receiving an $800 deer-hunting trip in 1988 and an $1,150 trip in 1989. Greek said both were for Canon City and that Lord has since reimbursed him.

Lord said he returned the money and amounts to other vendors who had done business with the district because he was concerned about conflict-of-interest appearances. But he has refused to produce canceled checks showing the reimbursements.

Greek’s company has been given $115,210 in contracts over the past four years, mostly for work on a multimillion-dollar pipeline project, and also for the design of a waterline in the district.

A former Orange County planning commissioner, Greek was ordered earlier this year to return more than $27,000 he received from city contracts after a Superior Court judge ruled that he violated the state’s conflict-of-interest laws in benefiting from permits the Planning Commission had approved.

Although Greek had abstained or absented himself from a majority of those votes, the judge ruled that Greek could still have influenced the positions of other planning commissioners.

In the case of the Colorado hunting trips, Greek said there is no special attempt to win business by making the free trips available.

“We try to get contracts from everybody all the time,” he said. “We’ve done work for the (Santa Margarita Water District) and we do work for other districts.”

On the Colorado trips, Lord and about six others joined Greek in the early morning hours waiting to hunt deer and at night, stayed either at a cabin with an outhouse in the woods or at a three-bedroom ranch house on the property. The hunters are provided meals, usually a brown bag lunch and dinner at night.

“Lots of people have gone on these trips from various agencies,” Greek said. “We just put out a general notice: Who wants to go?”

Lord has accompanied Greek on a spring camping trip to the Arizona desert, where they hunt javelina, a pig-like animal. In Arizona, everyone either camps or, like Lord, sleeps in their cars or trucks.

“He’s good, he’s a good shot,” Greek said of Lord. “Before we met him, I understand he did a lot of clay-pigeon shooting. He’s a lot of fun. When you go out on these hunting trips, everyone gets equal harassment. You just sit around the campfire and tell lies.”