Work on Home of O.C. Official Went Unpaid

Three engineers, formerly with a company which had contracts with the Santa Margarita Water District, said Friday that they performed unusual inspections at the home of the district’s assistant general manager and saw company documents indicating that no payment had been made for their work.

The engineers, who worked for the Irvine Consulting Group, or ICG, all left the geotechnical firm after the company closed its San Diego office. But about three years after the job was completed, all three remembered the work at Michael P. Lord’s Vista residence in San Diego County as being out of the ordinary.

“We got the feeling that the work was a freebie,” said Anthony F. Belfast, the principal engineer for ICG’s work at Lord’s home. The soils analysis, grading inspections and lab tests were valued by the engineers to be worth between $2,000 and $4,000.

According to Belfast, when he learned that a bill for the work had not been paid, he approached officials of Robert Bein, William Frost & Associates of Irvine. That company was doing architectural work on Lord’s property, and Belfast said he regarded it as the overall coordinator of Lord’s home improvements.

When no payment was forthcoming, Belfast and others contacted top officials at ICG in Irvine and never got a satisfactory explanation, he said.

“I remember that someone wanted to do a favor for this guy and it became more and more of a mess,” said Mark Delattre, the project geologist at Lord’s home. “The firm didn’t do many one-man projects like this.”

Delattre, who now works at Ninyo & Moore Geotechnical Consultants in Irvine, said that two years after the project, he looked through the Lord account file and saw letters from his predecessors on the job complaining that the work had not been paid for. Delattre said he saw nothing in the records indicating that any money had been received.

Company officials did not comment Friday. Neil Durkee, chairman of ICG’s board of directors, did not return a telephone call from The Times. Michael Landon, president of the company, said he could not remember the specific project and did not have time to check on whether the job had been paid.

The Times sent a written inquiry Friday to Lord, but he did not respond. His attorney, Gary M. Pohlson, who is representing Lord during an investigation by the district attorney’s office into allegations of conflict of interest, could not be reached.

ICG has been paid $376,840 from the district over the past four years, records show, mostly for soils and geotechnical work in the Coto de Caza and Talega Valley areas. The company has worked for the district for about 10 years, said Bill Dye, the district’s engineering director.

During that time, the company has provided the district’s general manager, Walter W. (Bill) Knitz, with $800 in meals and theater tickets. Knitz is also under investigation by the district attorney for alleged conflict of interest. According to economic disclosure forms Lord has filed, the company has given nothing to Lord.

If public officials do not pay the full value of work performed, they must abstain from influencing all decisions pertaining to the gift-giver within one year of accepting any gift worth more than $250. Any gift worth more than $50 must be disclosed.

The Times reported Friday that ICG and the Irvine architectural firm of Robert Bein, William Frost & Associates both performed work at Lord’s home beginning in May, 1990.

Bein, Frost has provided engineering and design work for the Santa Margarita Water District since the late 1970s, and has provided $14,000 in gifts to Lord and Knitz since 1987.

Officials for Bein, Frost said they provided plans for grading and landscaping at the Lord residence and were paid $3,350, the full value of the work. About $100 has yet to be paid, Lord’s attorney said.

Based on records on file at the San Diego County Planning Department, it appeared that ICG was a sub-consultant to Bein, Frost on the landscaping job. However, Robert Carley, a senior vice president for Bein, Frost, said Friday that ICG did not work for his company on the project and that any payment due ICG should have come directly from Lord.

Bein, Frost submitted plans on Lord’s behalf showing that he wanted a “rear-yard extension,” which required 1,300 cubic yards of dirt to fill in sloped areas. ICG was to provide a detailed “geotechnical investigation” that involved soil sampling, inspection and tests.

Kyle R. Campbell, a former project engineer for ICG who has since moved to Washington state, said he was not pleased to do the work. “This thing got dumped on me from one of the higher-ups (from ICG’s headquarters) in Irvine,” he said.

Before Campbell got on site, he said, excavation at Lord’s home already was underway. Normally, engineers inspect the soil before such work begins.

Delattre said ICG employees were critical of the quality of the grading work, which had extended onto a neighbor’s property and into a ravine.

“Nothing was according to plan,” he said. “It was like this guy wanted to fill in his slope and he hired Joe Blow to do it and just wing it.”

At some point, Lord wanted to put a pool in the back yard but ICG recommended against it based upon soil conditions, the project engineers said.

Delattre called the project “an evolving mess” and said he repeatedly questioned the need to be working on a single-family home when the company usually worked on larger-scale projects, such as housing developments.

“I kept saying, ‘Why are we bothering with this?’ ” Delattre said.

Eventually, Delattre and the others moved on to other projects. Delattre said he lost track of what happened in Vista until someone in the office raised a question about the job and he had to sort through files to find the answer. It was then, he said, he found several memos indicating that payment had never been made.

Throughout the water district controversy, Lord has contended that he did nothing wrong. He said he paid for architectural plans related to his home improvements and then performed the bulk of the work himself.

Norman Putnam, Lord’s next-door neighbor who gave him permission to allow a bulldozer, grader and loader to cross his property, said he never saw Lord do any of the heavy work. After the work was done, Putnam said, Lord replanted trees but has yet to replace the removed ground cover.