O.C. Rehires Planner at Developers’ Prodding

Under intense pressure from Orange County’s largest landowners, the cash-strapped county planning department has rehired a top manager who recently had been given a bonus to retire early.

Pat Stanton, 56, is being paid twice by the county: once as the retired manager of subdivision and grading, and again to do his old job part time at $44.50 per hour.

Stanton, a 29-year department veteran, was given a 4% boost in his pension Jan. 9. He said he returned last month “to help tune things up.”

He was rehired to approve project designs at the insistence of representatives for the Irvine Co. and Rancho Mission Viejo, acting planning director Larry Leaman said. At an emergency March 6 summit convened by the Building Industry Assn.’s Orange County chapter in Leaman’s offices, the developers said they wanted Stanton back on the job and would even pay his salary if necessary.

The companies “said this was important enough to them ... that if paying for Pat’s return was an issue, they were sure they would pay it,” Leaman said.

Assistant planning director Brian Speegle put it more strongly: “If I had asked them to go find Saddam Hussein and bring him back to me to get Pat back, they would have found Saddam Hussein,” he said.

In the end, county officials concluded they could not legally ask private developers to pay a public regulator’s salary.

While experts called it legal -- if unusual -- to rehire a planning official at the request of developers, one critic of the department said it illustrates an improperly cozy relationship between county planners and the developers they regulate.

“I have long been convinced that the developers really own and operate the planning and development function of the county,” said longtime critic Ray Chandos.

Stanton, however, said he is not beholden to the developers. “I work for ... the planning department and nobody else.”

Leaman said money was found in the department’s budget to bring Stanton back as “extra help,” which retired county employees are allowed to do for up to 720 hours a year. Stanton said he was back working five to six hours a day almost immediately.

Leaman, who took over after the department’s longtime director retired early in January amid a ballooning departmental fiscal crisis, said the agency is still losing about $400,000 a month, down from the $800,000 to $1 million it was losing monthly during much of 2002.

Several people at the meeting said the main reason they wanted Stanton back was because of potential delays in the processing of final tract maps. Until they are recorded, landowners cannot sell their properties to home builders and construction cannot begin. Stanton had routinely turned around such applications in less than a month, but after his departure, county staff told developers it might take as long as eight weeks.

Speegle and the head of the Building Industry Assn.’s county chapter, Lynne Fishel, said they were soon flooded with phone calls from developers, engineers and others demanding that the tract map problem be dealt with, preferably by bringing Stanton back. “Our industry is based on turnaround times,” Fishel said. “When they’re told it’s going to take double the time to turn around, there’s a reaction.”