Public Works Role Before Slide Under Investigation : La Conchita: Prosecutors begin inquiry into how geologic studies monitoring crumbling hillside were handled preceding the devastation.

Ventura County prosecutors have begun an inquiry into the way the Public Works Department handled geological studies prior to the devastating La Conchita landslide, sources have told The Times.

A Ventura County district attorney’s investigator is to meet this morning with officials of RJR Engineering Group, the Camarillo geology firm that has monitored the crumbling hillside for the county since January.

The investigator, Steve Hendrick, could not be reached for comment, and Dist. Atty. Michael D. Bradbury declined to comment on the focus of the inquiry or what his office hopes to learn about how the Public Works Department dealt with La Conchita.

Since at least the 1980s, the department has employed a geologist to review issues of ground stability in large-scale development plans around the county. And the Public Works Department worked as liaison between the county government and La Conchita since the residents were first warned late last summer that the hillside was dangerous.

RJR became the county’s consulting geologist in mid-January after county geologist Jim Fisher quit his post in December. Fisher works now for RJR.

Prosecutors “are looking for all copies of memos and all data with respect to La Conchita,” said Robert Anderson, one of RJR’s partners, who has done much of the field work inspecting the landslide.

Anderson said that Hendrick has asked to look at all correspondence between RJR and the county regarding La Conchita since January.

But he said Hendrick also wants to see RJR’s copies of reports dating back to 1979 from geologists hired by La Conchita Ranch, which owns the unstable hillside that has destroyed nine homes and damaged four more. And he wants to see the review of the reports that RJR did for the Public Works Department, Anderson said.

Anderson said it is unclear exactly what prosecutors are looking for, but that there is no indication the inquiry is directed at RJR.

Public Works Director Art Goulet said of the inquiry: “I don’t know anything about it.

“We’ve heard allegations that the county should have told these folks that there was an incipient landslide up above La Conchita,” he said. “The county counsel has advised us that that information is something the property owners should have gotten for themselves.”

The Public Works Department uses a geologist in reviewing plans for large developments such as subdivisions, but leaves geology studies on single lots to the people who want to build on them, he said.

“The building official, I believe, has the ability to require soils tests,” Goulet said. “That’s the process for a single-lot situation.”

La Conchita, a seaside enclave of 190 homes about 15 miles northwest of Ventura, developed on such single lots, Goulet said.

“What exists there is what we call an antiquated subdivision,” Goulet said. “It just means that these divisions of land were created when essentially there were no rules, and in many cases they took nothing into account. You can go across the state and find tiny little postage-stamp lots built in some pretty hazardous areas.”

RJR worked steadily for the Public Works Department at the rate of $65 per man-hour until about two weeks before the landslide, said RJR’s other partner, James O’Tousa.

Two weeks before the March 4 landslide, the Sheriff’s Department asked RJR to give best- and worst-case scenarios for how the hillside above La Conchita might collapse.

Before RJR could respond, said O’Tousa, Deputy Public Works Director John Crowley told the firm to stop going into the field because the county did not have enough money to pay them any more, leaving the site without any geologist to monitor it.

Crowley could not be reached for comment.

But Goulet said RJR was doing work at the sheriff’s request. “And they were told, ‘You don’t go out at the sheriff’s request, you go out for us, since we administer the contract.’ ”

Sheriff’s Lt. Arve Wells said he was looking forward to the report because he had hoped for “more specific information as to how many homes, how far the slide would encroach upon those homes, what it would do to those homes--would it raise them up and carry them along or would it crush them.”

Times staff writer Julie Fields contributed to this report.