Penalized Official Defends Actions

La Canada Flintridge City Councilwoman Deborah Orlik says she was doing her job, voting on whether to settle a lawsuit against the city concerning a controversial building project that had been a linchpin issue in her campaign.

The California Fair Political Practices Commission saw it otherwise, ruling that her vote affected the business of her husband, whose law firm represented one of the parties in the suit.

Last week, the commission called that vote a clear conflict of interest and fined Orlik $2,000 for violating the Political Reform Act.

When Orlik was first elected to the City Council to serve out the term of a deceased councilman, in 1998, the bedroom community at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains was hotly debating plans by retailer Sport Chalet to build a massive corporate headquarters near Angeles Crest Highway.

Orlik, who described herself in campaign literature as a “lawyer/publisher/ethicist,” ran as an anti-development candidate and won by two votes. (She was elected to a four-year term in 1999.) She has said she did not know that her husband’s firm represented Sport Chalet until the April 1998 election.

In July 1998, Orlik wrote to the commission asking for guidance on how to handle potential conflicts of interest, concerned that political opponents might try to hire her husband’s firm to preclude her from voting on certain hot-button issues.

The commission responded a month later, telling Orlik, “You may not participate in a governmental decision involving a client of your husband’s law firm if it is reasonably foreseeable that the decision will have a material effect on your husband’s law firm.”

In an interview Tuesday, Orlik said that, based on the letter’s description of “economic interest,” she decided that she did not have to recuse herself from voting every time her husband’s firm was involved in an issue.

She said she showed the letter to half a dozen lawyers, all of whom agreed with her, reasoning that her husband did not stand to significantly gain from the Sport Chalet project.

“That’s what practicing law is about,” she said. “It’s disagreeing about the law. That’s what happened here. The FPPC, myself and the other handful of lawyers I spoke with disagreed.”

Gabrielle Pryor, La Canada Flintridge’s former city manager, wrote a letter to the FPPC on Jan. 22, 1999, alleging that Orlik was acting improperly by participating in the debate on the project. After the City Council approved the Sport Chalet project March 1, a group called Friends of 91011 (the city’s ZIP Code) filed suit against the city and the Sport Chalet developer, which was represented by Cox, Castle & Nicholson, Randy Orlik’s firm.

In a closed-door meeting in April, the council discussed the litigation and voted on a settlement offer. A month later, the parties reached an agreement on the suit.

Under the stipulation agreed upon by both Orlik and the FPPC, when Orlik voted on whether to settle the lawsuit, she agreed that she violated the section of the Political Reform Act that prohibits public officials from using their official position to influence a governmental decision in which they have a financial interest.

Orlik said her decision to accept the fine was simply the price of doing business. “I did what I needed to do,” she said, “what the people elected me to do. If it cost me 2,000 bucks, it’s totally worth it.”