Supervisors Travel, Dine on War Chests

It is more than 8,000 miles outside his district--but County Supervisor Deane Dana used campaign funds to visit the South Pole to observe the work of county scientists.

Supervisor Ed Edelman spent campaign funds to attend the Los Angeles Philharmonic--when it played in Salzburg, Austria.

And Supervisor Mike Antonovich dipped into his campaign funds when he worked as an elections observer--in Armenia.

In recent years, Los Angeles County supervisors have tapped their campaign funds to pay for everything from first-class travel to exotic locales to gifts from exclusive Rodeo Drive boutiques to gourmet meals at some of Los Angeles’ trendiest restaurants.

Edelman, one of the most prodigious users of campaign funds for travel and entertainment in the last nine years, spent more than $40,000 on lunch and dinner at such exclusive establishments as Spago and the Monkey Bar, and $13,000 on gifts from such stores as Nordstrom and Tiffany & Co. The veteran supervisor also spent thousands of dollars in campaign funds to travel to France, Austria and Italy to represent the symphony and to study European urban planning issues.

Under California state law, such expenditures are legitimate if they are “directly related to political, legislative or governmental purpose.”

Supervisors Edelman, Dana and Antonovich said their campaign expenditures satisfied those criteria and were legal. The expenditures are a necessary part of public life, they said, especially in the absence of county-funded expense accounts.

“You don’t get to charge anything to the county,” Dana said. “I was shocked when I came into office because I came out of a business that paid expenses. You have to raise funds from your supporters just to conduct business.”

But state officials who are responsible for enforcing the 20-year-old law say it is overly broad and virtually impossible to enforce. In the absence of stringent oversight, even the law’s authors say that politicians increasingly dip into their campaign coffers to enhance their lifestyles.

The problem is that the money is donated largely by special interests seeking to curry favor with elected officials, said Bob Stern, general counsel for the California Commission on Campaign Financing, who helped write the 1974 Political Reform Act.

“Campaign funds should be used for campaigning--communicating with voters--and not on lavish dinners,” Stern said.

Against this backdrop, activists are seeking to go beyond the state restrictions and curb politicians’ spending on expenses that appear to be peripheral to election campaigning.

In November, voters in San Francisco agreed to eliminate so-called officeholder accounts, donations from political supporters that supervisors used for non-campaign-related expenses such as travel and entertainment.

In December, the city of Los Angeles’ Ethics Commission imposed new rules to further tighten its laws limiting the nature and amount of spending on entertainment, travel, gifts and club memberships.

And this month the Federal Election Commission is considering new restrictions on members of Congress, who continue to spend their political war chests on pleasure trips, luxury cars and memberships in the House gymnasium, despite a law barring diversion of campaign funds for personal use.

But few reform efforts have been attempted in the county, making it “the final frontier” of campaign law, said Cecilia Gallardo, local government affairs director for Common Cause.

None of the supervisors said they saw a need for reform, except board Chairwoman Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, who said there is room for slightly more disclosure of how and why the funds were spent. Supervisor Gloria Molina, who has advocated limits on campaign contributions and spending, declined to be interviewed.

The Times reviewed campaign finance reports from 1985 to June, 1993, for longtime board members Edelman, Dana and Antonovich. The review also included Molina, who was elected to the board in 1991, and Burke, who took office one year ago. The travel and entertainment expenses cited here do not include dinners, receptions and parties that the supervisors said were fund-raising events.

The supervisors clearly disagree about the appropriate use of their campaign funds.

Molina and Edelman used the money to buy Christmas gifts, while Antonovich paid for them out of his own pocket. Edelman bought dinners for constituents and supporters, but Burke said she used personal funds to pay for such meals.

Overall, spending on travel and entertainment has grown since the mid-1980s. Since 1985, Edelman and Antonovich have spent an annual average of $11,000 on travel and entertainment. Molina averaged the same $11,000 level of expenditures during her 2 1/2-year tenure on the board, while Dana spent an average of $6,800 annually since 1985. Burke has thus far not spent any campaign money on out-of-county travel or gifts and only $833 on meals and club membership dues.

Dana said he spent thousands of campaign dollars to visit the South Pole with his wife three years ago to gain firsthand knowledge of research conducted there by scientists affiliated with the county’s Natural History Museum. Dana also stopped off in Santiago, Chile, Long Beach’s sister city, to meet with business and government leaders.

“You get a better appreciation of what they’re trying to do down there by going,” Dana said.

Unlike Dana and Edelman, Antonovich said he never combined vacations with official business. Antonovich spent the most on travel--about $82,000 since 1985. Virtually all his trips in the last nine years were the result of appointments to various commissions by former Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush. Antonovich said he was invited by the Armenian government to observe elections in 1992 because his district is home to thousands of Armenian immigrants.

“All of those trips are up and back, and there is no misuse of funds,” Antonovich said.

In 1992, Edelman spent about $9,000 on two European trips that included some personal vacation time. On one trip, he spent more than $1,600 in campaign funds in Salzburg, where he attended rehearsals, concerts and receptions by the Los Angeles Philharmonic. He also visited Rome that year on a land-use seminar on European urban planning issues organized by George Lefcoe, a USC professor of real estate law.

Edelman also used campaign funds to pay for more than 140 restaurant meals, according to campaign reports. He said his dinner guests were constituents, supporters, lobbyists and staff members whose opinions and knowledge help him in conducting county affairs.

And in an interview before his decision not to run for reelection to a sixth term, Edelman said that if you are going to talk over a meal “obviously, you want to go to a fairly decent place.”

According to the reports, Edelman dined at Ca’Brea, Valentino, The Palm, Il Cielo and The Ivy, which critics agree are among the finest in Los Angeles.

But of the more than 140 meals, Edelman would only identify one guest, a musician making a guest appearance with the Los Angeles Philharmonic whom he took to Spago last year.

“While many of these events occurred in public places, the supervisor believes that the persons who attended such events had a reasonable expectation of privacy that their names would not be disclosed to the media, and the supervisor feels it is important to honor that expectation,” Edelman stated in a memo in response to inquiries by The Times.

Under state law, supervisors are required to retain restaurant and other receipts for four years, but are not required to identify their guests. Supervisors are unlikely to be asked for documentation because regulators would review their campaign finances only in response to well-documented complaints.

“On a lot of occasions, we take politicians at their word,” said Darryl East, chief of enforcement for the state Fair Political Practices Commission. “If a politician says I had dinner with Jim and talked about city business, we’d have no way to refute that. And the same goes with travel.”

Edelman also stated that he believes “it is prudent to pick up the tab for such meals, particularly with constituents and lobbyists, rather than to have such persons pay for the supervisor.”

Burke said she usually pays for restaurant meals out of her own pocket, but does use her campaign funds to pay for her $150 a month membership dues at a private Downtown dining club, City Club on Bunker Hill.

Burke had no travel expenses, while Molina spent $17,233 on out-of-county travel, mostly to attend Democratic Party conventions, presidential campaign events, and political meetings.

Supervisors Edelman, Molina and Dana also used campaign funds to purchase gifts. It is legal to use the funds for this purpose in some cases, and officeholders are not required to identify the type of gift or the recipient in their campaign finance reports.

Antonovich, who buys Christmas gifts for his staff with his own money, suggested that Edelman and Molina are “cheap” for spending campaign funds on gifts for all sorts of occasions. In addition to buying Christmas gifts for her staff, Molina spent more than $5,000 on Dodgers and Raiders tickets for constituents and supporters in 1991.

Edelman declined to specify the gifts he purchased from such Beverly Hills emporiums as Tiffany & Co. and Geary’s, but said most of the purchases were modest gifts for staff members that cost no more than $75 apiece.

Although Antonovich spends tens of thousands of dollars on trips, he chastised Edelman for going to Austria with the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

“Going to hear a symphony in Austria is an abuse,” Antonovich said.

But Edelman defended the expense, saying it was an honor for the symphony to participate in the annual Salzburg Music Festival. And he said that although he went on to vacation in Europe after the festival, he paid for those expenses out of his own pocket.

Stern pointed out that to write off domestic and international travel, politicians must spend at least half of their time on official or political matters, a standard that is rarely monitored.

Reform advocates such as Stern say it would be easier to accept such expenses if they were not so lavish. Politicians should be limited to spending only what they would be allotted for out-of-town travel under government expense rules. In the county’s case, that is $150 to $200 per day for lodging and meals, far less than what supervisors typically spend. Under those rules, supervisors would no longer be permitted to fly first class, or to use campaign finances to upgrade coach fares paid for by the county.