L.A. County Donor Curbs Lack Teeth

By Jack Leonard

Sept. 13, 2005 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

Nine years after voters overwhelmingly approved an initiative that limited fundraising for Los Angeles County elections, violations of the law are going undiscovered and unpunished.

A Times investigation found that no candidate or donor has ever been fined or prosecuted for breaking the rules. The two agencies designated to police the law disagree about which one should look for violations. And the district attorney’s office has concluded that the rules are all but unenforceable.

At the same time, a review of records since the 2003-04 election cycle found more than two dozen contributions that either violated contribution limits or came from registered lobbyists, who were barred from contributing to county campaigns. Among the recipients of those donations: three county supervisors and the district attorney.

“Nobody is minding the store,” said Bob Stern, president of the Center for Governmental Studies in Los Angeles. “If you don’t have any agency monitoring and no enforcement, people think they can get away with it.”

The county’s minimal efforts to enforce its campaign laws stand in stark contrast to the strict approach at Los Angeles City Hall:

* The five-member city Ethics Commission has four auditors who scour campaign paperwork for violations and four investigators who follow up on complaints. Neither county agency that oversees campaign laws -- the registrar-recorder’s office and the district attorney’s office -- employs investigators or auditors to scrutinize campaign filings.

* Violators of the city’s laws face substantial fines -- more than $978,000 since 2004. In that same period, the county has issued $250 in fines for county elections law violations, all of them for late paperwork and outside the scope of the 1996 law.

* The city examines records to find schemes by donors to skirt limits by reimbursing friends, relatives or associates -- an illegal practice known as political money laundering. No one at the county checks for money laundering.

* The city Ethics Commission has clear authority to issue subpoenas, take testimony and impose fines. The county’s vaguely worded law gave no agency such power, and prosecutors said they lacked the authority to get the evidence they needed to enforce the rules.

Those differences surprise few campaign reform advocates.

The county’s five elected supervisors manage a $19-billion bureaucracy responsible for running hospitals, caring for foster children, collecting child support and jailing criminals. Yet, except on rare occasions, they have a lower profile than the Los Angeles mayor or City Council members.

“As a result, there’s no one pounding on their doors to say, ‘Tighten up your ethics and election laws,’ ” said Tracy Westen, chief executive of the Center for Governmental Studies.

To be sure, few counties in California have the kind of vigorous enforcement that the city does. Only San Francisco, which has a unified city-county government, has an ethics commission.

But three county supervisors and Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley, when informed of the county’s failure to pursue campaign finance violations, said county officials should take immediate steps to fix the lax enforcement.

“What bothers me is that this law has been on the books for nine years and no one has called attention to this,” said Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, who originally proposed the rules. “The fact that there is confusion on the part of the people who are charged with enforcing it is a wake-up call.”

Supervisor Michael Antonovich said he would ask the registrar-recorder today to create a special unit to ensure that candidates comply with the rules, while Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke said she would support improved enforcement, depending on the cost.

Cooley said he believed that the county should create its own ethics commission. “There is a void here,” he said.

But Supervisor Don Knabe said there were too few violations to justify a commission, adding that the county has fewer elected positions than the city -- eight compared with 18. And the amount of improper donations, he said, is far outweighed by the hundreds of thousands of dollars that are given within the rules. “I think the county does a strong job policing itself,” he said.

Campaign finance advocates said it was up to the supervisors to force the district attorney and county election officials to act.

“In the absence of leadership from a member on the Board of Supervisors, it’s going to have to wait until there’s a scandal that galvanizes public attention,” said Rebecca Avila, chairwoman of California Common Cause and former executive director of the city Ethics Commission.

It was just such a scandal that led voters to create the city Ethics Commission in 1990. The commission was the brainchild of a blue-ribbon panel appointed by Mayor Tom Bradley, who was under fire for his role as a paid director emeritus of a savings and loan.

The commission has since made a name for itself as an independent body that is willing to fine anyone who runs afoul of the law. Two years ago, it fined Mayor James K. Hahn’s political campaign committees $53,522.

“People come to understand that nobody is above the law,” said LeeAnn Pelham, the commission’s executive director.

Until voters overwhelmingly approved Proposition B in 1996, the county had no campaign finance rules and incumbents routinely raised millions of dollars, deterring challengers.

The measure prohibits candidates, in most cases, from accepting more than $1,000 per donor for each election or more than $1,000 per year for their officeholder accounts, which pay for such expenses as travel and supplies.

The measure also bans candidates from knowingly soliciting or accepting donations from registered lobbyists.

Violators face a $5,000 fine and, if they knowingly break the law, prosecution for a misdemeanor that could lead to six months in jail. But the law did not spell out how the rules would be enforced and left it up to the registrar-recorder and district attorney to “receive and investigate complaints” and choose staff “responsible for the enforcement and administration” of the rules.

Registrar-Recorder Conny McCormack said she believed that the law required her agency only to educate candidates about the rules and forward complaints about violations to the district attorney’s office.

“Clearly, we don’t have investigative authority,” she said. “We take a cursory look at these filings. We don’t study them and compare every little thing against Proposition B.”

Six clerks review campaign statements, but they check thousands each year, not only for county elections but also for hundreds of local and state races.

Amid the paperwork, violations are overlooked.

Antonovich accepted $2,000 from the Commerce Casino for his officeholder account -- twice the legal limit. He received $1,500 from David Fleming, an attorney and Metropolitan Transportation Authority board member.

He also accepted contributions to his campaign from five donors who each exceeded the $1,000 limit.

Burke accepted $1,500 from a commercial property firm.

She said her chief fundraiser caught the mistake and corrected it, but her campaign staff forgot to amend election records to reflect that.

Antonovich said his campaign inadvertently accepted the contributions and returned the money Wednesday after a call from The Times. “We take full responsibility for any accounting errors,” he said.

Registrar officials do not compare campaign donors against registered lobbyists, saying that it would be too time-consuming. Unlike Los Angeles and the state, the county has not computerized its election records so clerks must search reams of paper records.

Antonovich accepted $1,750 total from five registered lobbying firms, most of which represented developers who needed county approval for their plans. He said those donations were returned Wednesday.

Burke received $250 from one -- a donation she said was accepted in error to a campaign account that she has since closed.

Knabe received $3,125 total from five registered lobbyists and an additional contribution in excess of the $1,000 campaign limit: $1,500.

He said he hired an accountant last year who did not check for registered lobbyists. Knabe said he would return the contributions.

Noting that he received more than 1,100 contributions last election, he said, “If we make a mistake or two, that’s fine. I think we’ve done a pretty good job.”

Cooley’s records indicated that the district attorney accepted $125 in July 2003 from lobbyist Edwin K. Marzec. But Cooley acknowledged that he also had accepted another $5,500 from lobbyists that year because he was unaware of the ban until he learned about it from a lobbyist in December 2003.

His campaign treasurer audited his donations and returned the $5,500 last year. Cooley said Marzec’s contribution was missed.

Unlike the city Ethics Commission, county officials do not examine campaign statements for money laundering and have no plans to do so. In the last year, the Ethics Commission has issued more than 90 fines to people and companies that participated in money-laundering schemes.

In the few cases where county election clerks find blatant violations, they send their filings to the district attorney’s office for enforcement.

Since 1998, the registrar-recorder has referred nine cases, all involving allegations that candidates loaned themselves more than $20,000.

One of those was Lynne Plambeck.

Plambeck, who runs a small Burbank business that recycles film, tried last year to unseat Antonovich from the northern county supervisorial seat he has held since 1980. Plambeck said she thought she needed to loan herself $50,000 to compete against a candidate with more than $500,000 in campaign funds.

She said she consulted the registrar’s office and thought she could make the loan. Three months later, county elections officials notified her that she had violated the law and could face criminal prosecution and a $90,000 fine.

“I thought I was going to throw up,” Plambeck recalled. “If they did this to me, gosh, I could lose my house over this.”

Upon learning that supervisors had violated campaign rules with impunity, Plambeck said it was unfair that the law was policed haphazardly and that it was no coincidence that incumbents have gone unquestioned.

“I’m not surprised by it. I’m discouraged by it,” she said.

Like all nine referrals from elections officials to the district attorney’s office, Plambeck’s case resulted in no criminal charges or fines.

In 2001, the county created a task force to improve enforcement that included prosecutors and officials from the registrar’s office.

David Demerjian, the head of the district attorney’s then-new Public Integrity Division, said he recalled that registrar officials had raised concerns that prosecutors never filed criminal charges. “I said, ‘If you send us the cases, we’ll certainly review them for filing,’ ” Demerjian said he told them.

That would have marked a departure. Under Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti, the office had never sought charges or fines. Garcetti, now chairman of the city Ethics Commission, declined to comment.

But Demerjian later decided that prosecutors could not act on the referrals.

The district attorney’s office, he said, lacks the authority to obtain a search warrant for records that are needed for successful prosecutions because the crimes are misdemeanors, not felonies. And the office lacks the authority the city Ethics Commission has to subpoena records. Prosecutors could ask the grand jury to subpoena documents, but Demerjian said the office reserves that panel for serious felony cases.

So when Plambeck’s case arrived on his desk, Demerjian said, he looked at the evidence and decided that he could not file charges without more records.

“I think the problem we have now is a lack of tools to actually investigate,” Demerjian said. “I don’t think anyone foresaw this.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Improper contributions

Since the 2003-04 election cycle, three Los Angeles County supervisors and the district attorney have accepted contributions banned by the 1996 campaign finance reform initiative.

Supervisor Mike Antonovich

Contributions that exceeded $1,000 limit:

Commerce Casino, $2,000

W. Charles Chastain, $1,500

David Fleming (lawyer, Latham & Watkins), $1,500

Law Offices of Michael Thomas, $1,875

Matich Corp., $2,000

Transamerica Broadcasting Corp. (KTYM-AM), $1,350

SCC Acquisitions, $2,000

Contributions from registered lobbyists:

Hans Giraud & Associates, $350

Land Design Consultants, $525