Looking Bad Is Trouble Enough

Larry J. Calemine, the executive director of the agency charged with reviewing secession proposals from the San Fernando Valley, Hollywood and the harbor area, moonlights as a real estate consultant. He accepts money from developers doing business with the Los Angeles government even as he oversees a process that could profoundly reshape the city. Amazingly, he does not see this as a conflict. More amazing still, neither does the chairman of the Local Agency Formation Commission (LAFCO), the supposedly neutral public panel that employs Calemine to guide the secession studies.

Exactly how much Calemine earns outside of his $100,000 annual LAFCO salary is “none of your business,” he told a Times reporter. If he intends to remain a public servant, he’d better learn how wrong he is.

In the past, Calemine has defended his integrity by saying, “Anyone who knows me knows I am a professional.” As surprising as it may seem to Calemine, a self-styled entrepreneur who has spent decades building up citywide connections, everybody doesn’t know him. Those who don’t will judge him--and, by extension, the study that will determine whether secession goes on a citywide ballot--by his actions. And his actions as described in a Times story Tuesday don’t meet the highest standard.

California law and LAFCO’s conflict-of-interest code bar officials from making any governmental decision in which they have a financial interest. No one has accused Calemine of violating these codes, at least not technically. But his private work and public work definitely overlap.

As one example, Calemine was paid more than $10,000 by an attorney to lobby City Council member Hal Bernson, who is also a LAFCO commissioner, on a zoning variance. The same attorney appeared just weeks later before the commission, representing Valley secessionists. No matter what Calemine intended, this maze of shifting obligations and loyalties looks bad. It is exactly what a scrupulous public servant must avoid.

Coming up with an objective study of such a politically charged question as secession is challenge enough. Yet only county Supervisors Yvonne Brathwaite Burke and Zev Yaroslavsky, both LAFCO commissioners, have publicly questioned Calemine’s outside consulting work and deemed it inappropriate. LAFCO Chairman Thomas E. Jackson merely defended Calemine’s “high ethical and moral standards.”

The commission should let Calemine know that even the appearance of conflict will not be tolerated. Failure to do at least that much leaves the professionalism and integrity of LAFCO itself in question.