Garofalo Employer Loses Job

The Huntington Beach Conference and Visitors Bureau voted 8 to 1 on Wednesday to terminate its visitors-guide publishing contract with a company that employs Mayor Dave Garofalo.

The vote came a month after the bureau’s board was advised by the city attorney that it should end the contract with Coatings Resource Corp., whose president bought the contract from Garofalo in January 1998 but kept the mayor on as a paid consultant.

Steve Bone, a nonvoting member of the bureau’s board and president of Robert Mayer Corp., which owns the Waterfront Hilton Beach Resort hotel, urged the voting members to terminate the contract immediately.

“You may not like what’s happened,” he said, but the City Council “has said to terminate. It’s not a negotiable position.”

At the center of the controversy is Garofalo, who won the publishing contract for the visitors guide in 1993, a year before he joined the City Council. Since then, Garofalo has voted to approve funding for the bureau four times. He abstained once and was absent once.

The Orange County district attorney’s office, the Orange County Grand Jury and the state Fair Political Practices Commission are investigating Garofalo for possible conflict-of-interest violations.

At Tuesday’s council meeting, with Garofalo stepping away from the dais after declaring a possible conflict, members reaffirmed that the visitors bureau must terminate the publishing contract for its annual guide or lose its city funding, which totals $270,000 a year.