Dealings Between Pasadena, Tournament Questioned

Business dealings between the city of Pasadena and the Tournament of Roses have resulted in “the appearance of impropriety,” a panel of lawyers and accountants told the Pasadena City Council on Monday.

But because tournament volunteers receive no compensation for staging the annual Rose Parade and Rose Bowl football game, there have been no actual breaches of ethics or laws, said former state Supreme Court Justice Cruz Reynoso, chairman of the council-appointed panel.

Nevertheless, Reynoso and his colleagues raised questions about the constitutionality of some of the rights and privileges granted by the city to the tournament.

They also said that because of accounting mistakes, the tournament owes the city at least $479,797, dating from 1984.

Council members who were seeing the report for the first time Monday evening responded cautiously and with some skepticism. They scheduled further discussion of the report for next Tuesday’s meeting.

The tournament has been putting on the New Year’s festival and football extravaganza for 95 years. Reynoso and his colleagues found that the length of the relationship had set a tone of “cooperativeness,” with little of the “tough scrutiny and analysis” that business relationships usually have.

The panel found, for example, that members of the 935-person organization have negotiated contracts with fellow tournament members who are also on the City Council, including Councilman William Thomson and former Councilman John Crowley, as well as former Assistant City Manager Bill Lewis.

It also questioned a decision by the council to relinquish its role in negotiations with television broadcasters, leaving the tournament to cut multimillion-dollar deals on its own.

In 1989, the tournament, along with the Pac-10 and Big 10 football conferences whose champions play in the Rose Bowl game, negotiated a nine-year, $103.2-million deal with ABC-TV to broadcast the New Year’s Day game.

The tournament has been under attack by minority critics since October, 1991, when a descendant of Christopher Columbus was named grand marshal of the 1992 Rose Parade. American Indians charged that the choice was insensitive to their ancestors, many of whom died from the diseases and violence unleashed on the New World in Columbus’ wake.

Tournament officials quelled some of the criticism by appointing a second grand marshal, then-Rep. Ben Nighthorse Campbell (D-Colorado), an American Indian. Campbell has since been elected to the U.S. Senate. Last May, after black groups charged that the relationship between the city and the tournament included financial improprieties, the City Council appointed Reynoso to prepare a report on the relationship between the city and the tournament.

Reynoso was joined on the audit committee by Pasadena attorney Carolyn H. Carlburg and members of the Los Angeles accounting firm of Simpson & Simpson.

The Ad Hoc Committee to End Discrimination, a black-led group that claims 1,200 members, pressed for an investigation of contracts negotiated by council members who were also tournament members, as well as the tournament’s record of recruiting and hiring minorities.

“The tournament is the goose that lays the golden eggs,” said Councilman Isaac Richard, who is black. “But we’re not getting any of the gold.”

The relationship between the city and the tournament is spelled out in a 25-year contract agreed to in 1984, the report noted.

Three members of the City Council, two of them tournament members, negotiated the contract, with staff assistance from former assistant city manager Lewis, who was also a tournament member, the report said.

Under the terms of the agreement, the city and the tournament share expenses and revenues generated by the two big New Year’s Day events.