Orange City Manager Recommends Police Chief Be Terminated

Ending nearly three months of tense anticipation, City Manager David L. Rudat has asked that Police Chief John R. Robertson be fired.

Rudat made his recommendation to the politically divided City Council on Tuesday night in a closed session that dragged on for four hours.

Robertson and his attorney were summoned to a meeting with Rudat and Personnel Director Steven V. Pham at City Hall on Wednesday afternoon. There, the chief was given 14 reasons for his recommended termination, with most of them relating to charges he improperly investigated high-level city officials, said David L. Miller, Robertson’s attorney.

The chief, who has been on paid administrative leave since Oct. 15, also was ordered to surrender his badge, identification, weapons, pager and city-issued automobile.

“Robertson and I rode over to the meeting in that auto, and I asked to turn it in at the close of business tomorrow,” Miller said. “But they had a police sergeant follow us back to my office, and he retrieved those items in the parking garage. What a dignified ending to a distinguished career,” he said sarcastically.

The ordeal of the 46-year-old chief is far from over.

Now that he has been given notice, he is entitled to an administrative hearing to give his side of events, said City Atty. David A. De Berry. City Council members will then vote on whether to support Rudat’s recommendation.

De Berry and Pham both emphasized that Robertson will have the chance to respond to the evidence gathered by two outside law firms over the last 12 weeks.

“This thing is not over by any stretch,” De Berry said. “Maybe [Robertson] has some perfectly good reasons for what happened.”

The tentative date for the termination to take effect is Jan. 27, Pham said. The City Council is expected to take its vote on or before that date.

In the eyes of Robertson’s attorneys and community activists who support him, the chief’s likely dismissal is inextricably linked to the ongoing investigation into the alleged misappropriation of municipal funds by the city’s trash hauling and recycling companies.

The Police Department has been investigating Orange Disposal Service Inc., which has held the city’s trash contract for 42 years, and its affiliated company, Orange Resource Recovery Systems Inc., which started handling the city’s recycling in 1994. Officials have said that some city revenue from the sale of recycled materials was misappropriated by the trash haulers, and people involved have told police the sums could exceed $6 million.

The event that ultimately prompted Rudat to seek Robertson’s dismissal occurred last summer when a court-sealed affidavit related to the trash case was leaked to The Times, and Robertson began trying to learn the source of the leak. Multiple fingerprints were found on Rudat’s copy of the document, and Robertson was trying to learn the identities of people who had handled the affidavit.

De Berry has said that this investigation was improper because the district attorney’s office, which is now handling the trash case, had told him the leak was not a crime and would not be prosecuted.

Robertson has disputed that version of events through his attorney.

“We have said all along that this is political retaliation,” Miller said. “This thing just reeks of a personal vendetta by Mr. Rudat. . . . I am shocked at the arrogance of this city government.”

City Councilman Michael Alvarez, who supports Robertson, said he came out of Tuesday’s closed session thinking it was “a personal battle between the chief and the city manager. The timing appears to be retaliatory.”