School Aides to Offer Defense of Land Deals : Education: To answer criticism of Santa Ana district spending for property, officials will explain the purchase process at a board meeting tonight.

Officials at Orange County’s biggest school district, stung by critics who say they are spending too much to buy land for new schools, are launching a counteroffensive to sway public opinion on two controversial acquisitions.

Santa Ana Unified School District officials said they plan to offer at tonight’s Board of Education meeting a full presentation that will explain the district’s process for buying land and defend it against allegations of abuse.

And in a move that seems certain to deepen divisions on the five-member school board, several trustees have offered up agenda items dealing with the alleged leaking of “confidential material” on land purchases presented to the board in closed session.

The board is scheduled to consider censuring or taking other action against an unnamed member who allegedly disclosed the material publicly, and it will also weigh whether to develop a code of ethics to guard against similar disclosures in the future.

Board member Rosie Avila said she may find herself targeted tonight by board rivals over the secrecy issue because of her criticism of some school projects. But she added that she is not worried.

“I don’t think I have broken any laws of confidentiality,” she said in an interview Monday. “I think it’s just a smoke screen (by the board majority). The real issue is that we cannot continue this incompetence in our future land deals.”

Avila said that rather than trying to defuse debate with threats of censure, the board “should be asking more questions and getting more documents (about recent land deals). . . .”

“Legitimate questions are being asked, so why are they still wishing this could be hidden?” she said.

The board maneuverings come in the wake of recent articles in The Times that raised questions about the financing of two multimillion-dollar school land deals.

In the 1990 purchase of a proposed site for a new school and headquarters at Grand and Chestnut avenues, financial data showed that the district ended up paying $18.5 million for an 18-acre industrial site that had sold for $12.6 million just a few months earlier.

And in a current proposal to build a “space-saver” school on 11 acres at the back of the Bristol Market Place, the district is planning to spend nearly $22 million for a site that realty experts say appears to be worth less than half that amount. The deal has already received preliminary approval from the state, which would put up the money.

In each of these deals, critics have questioned potentially improper relationships between key players in the transactions.

In the Bristol Market Place purchase, for instance, an Orange County appraiser--who prepared a report that has now come under fire--was hired by the school district for the $25,000 job at the recommendation of the law firm at which his father is a senior partner.

And in the 1990 deal, school board members recently learned, a director of the company that originally owned the land--an electronics manufacturer called EECO--was the father-in-law of both a realtor who brokered the deal and the general partner in the company that bought the land.

Within weeks, that second firm, Burke-Santa Ana Partners, began negotiations with the school district over the lot and ended up making a profit of nearly $6 million. That led to threats of litigation by EECO over allegations that the deal was unfairly influenced by family ties.

Michael G. Vail, the school district’s senior director of facilities, said it would be unreasonable for officials to have known about such relationships in buying the land.

“I don’t think there’s any way we could have known all those things. It’s impossible,” he said in an interview. “We don’t know everything in the world that’s going on, and even if we did, it wouldn’t have affected the price of the land.”

Vail said he will discuss such issues at tonight’s meeting in a presentation requested by Board of Education members on the two purchases and the acquisition process that went into them. The offering is to include discussion of how the district goes about identifying potential land sites, appraising their value and ultimately negotiating for possible purchase.

“I don’t know what the purpose of (the presentation) is,” Vail said. “I’m just a middle-level manager who does what he’s told. If they want a presentation, I’ll give them a presentation.”

Board member Robert Balen said he believes the district has already answered any suggestions that the purchase prices for its land were “out of line.”

But he said one issue still left unaddressed centers on the allegations that district officials may have publicly leaked confidential documents on the project, threatening the course of negotiations. For that reason, he and fellow board members Sal Mendoza and Audrey Yamagata-Noji are introducing an agenda item tonight to develop a board code of ethics.

The code, Balen said, “should govern our actions in dealing with each other.”

Meanwhile, the board will also consider whether to take action against any board members found to have violated the closed-session confidentiality laws.

Attorney Keith Breon, who offers legal counsel for the board, said he is advising the district that it can publicly censure any violators, request a civil injunction in court, or even ask the district attorney’s office to open a criminal investigation.

“There’s an issue of liability here,” he said, “and someone ought to be discussing it publicly.”