Riordan Calls Possible Conflict of Interest ‘Honest Mistake’

Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan on Saturday acknowledged a potential conflict of interest in his approval of a valuable city contract for a firm that is a tenant in a building partly owned by the mayor.

Riordan said he made an “honest mistake” in twice signing or forwarding contract amendments for A.C. Martin and Associates, which increased the firm’s payments for the earthquake retrofitting of City Hall by more than $5 million.

After news media inquiries about his actions, the mayor’s office last week requested that the state Fair Political Practices Commission determine whether Riordan had a conflict of interest. The mayor could be fined if the political watchdog agency finds that he did.

“This was an honest, inadvertent error, but nonetheless an error for which I take full responsibility,” Riordan said Saturday after a community appearance in South-Central Los Angeles. The mayor added that his ownership of the building has “been in public records for several years. That should have been picked up by my staff or by myself, but somehow it missed the radar screen” when it came time to consider the contract.

Riordan blamed the mistake on the large volume of documents crossing his desk.

He added that he owns only 13% of the downtown building where A.C. Martin and Associates is located and that the firm’s success in winning city contracts has not brought him financial gain.

“It’s an investment that is worthless,” Riordan said of his stake in the Fine Arts Building on West 7th Street. “I’ve gotten no income out of the building in nine years.”

The mayor estimated that the value of the historic building, which his partnership helped restore, has dropped from $17.5 million to about $7 million.

In June, Riordan signed an ordinance that extended the architectural firm’s contract by three years and hiked its fees from $8.8 million to $12.8 million. An additional $1-million contract extension came a month later to further assess City Hall damage caused by the 1994 Northridge earthquake. Riordan did not give final approval to the second amendment, but sent it on to the Board of Public Works for action.

The case will be the second investigation of the mayor conducted by the FPPC. Earlier this year, the agency cleared Riordan of conflict of interest allegations, finding that he never knew that one of his votes would benefit an engineering company in which he was a major shareholder.