Official, Ventura Settle Campaign Suit

A settlement has been reached between the city of Ventura and Councilman Neal Andrews over allegations he had broken a city campaign law.

Under the terms, Andrews and Sharon Schnell, treasurer of Pacific Action Consortium, a committee Andrews is accused of controlling, will each pay the city $1,050. “It was a fairly trivial matter,” Andrews said. “We don’t think we did anything wrong.”

But Santa Barbara attorney Stan Roden, hired by the city to investigate the allegations, disagreed.

The city filed a civil suit against Andrews, alleging that while running for a City Council seat last fall he broke the city’s Campaign Reform Act. The 1995 act sets guidelines for campaign fund-raising.

“The law is clear: You can’t have two checking accounts; you can’t control two committees; and you can’t coordinate between two organizations,” all of which Andrews did, according to Roden.

At the heart of the issue were newspaper ads supporting Andrews that ran Nov. 2 and 3. The ads were paid by Pacific Action Consortium, but Andrews’ signature appears on the checks. Andrews started Pacific Action Consortium in 1997.

“He and he alone was the one to make the decision to write the ad, and he wrote the check on the PAC account,” Roden said.

In an answer to the suit, Andrews maintains he was merely performing administrative functions for Pacific Action Consortium, which is a client of his business, Horizon Management Services. The ads were created and paid for at the direction of Schnell, Andrews said. The amount paid for the ads was $723.96.

“The core of this issue is very small,” Andrews said. “If I really did control [Pacific Action Consortium], I certainly would have spent more of their money and less of my own.”

Roden said the city could have filed criminal charges but instead decided that filing a civil suit, and then agreeing to a settlement, was the best action. “Our overriding goal was to inform the public, to create a public record and to create a deterrent to make sure this doesn’t happen again,” he said.

The maximum fine under the ordinance is three times the amount in question, which is how the $2,100 figure was reached for the settlement, Roden said. The suit will be dismissed with prejudice, which means the city can’t bring the complaint back later.

But Ed Lacey, Andrews’ attorney, said the county district attorney’s office has been conducting a parallel investigation. “They can make their own decision if there was any violation of state law, but we’re hoping that the D.A. will see this settlement and say, ‘That’s good enough for us too,’” he said.