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“We are a well-managed City.” “We are ethical.”

“We are not Bell or Carson or Hawthorne.” “We don’t have those problems, our City officials are not corrupt or plagued by scandals.”

These are refrains oft heard around City Hall. Torrance officials pride themselves on ethics. What will they do now as that ethical compass that has guided and shaped our community hangs in the balance?

We are not Bell.  Or are we?

On November 18, 2014 the Council discussed the award of the City’s emergency services contract. Mayor Furey was under fire.  The FPPC had already initiated an investigation for alleged improprieties dealing with the Furey PAC.  At the meeting, Furey attempted to quell any notion of wrongdoing by forcefully stating:

“I had nothing to do with it…They had no coordination with me…I didn’t ask them to do it.  There was no control that I would have over it…This was no impropriety.  Although there can be a perception and there’s a local newspaper that wants to believe there is a perception.  There is no perception…I don’t see a conflict and I’m sorry that you do.”

The inescapable fact however, long suspected and now confirmed by the $35,000 fine levied by the FPPC, is that his campaign did coordinate with the PAC and even tried to conceal that coordination by going to such lengths as establishing fake e-mail accounts.

His campaign broke the law. The violation enabled powerful backers to pour more money into his campaign than is legally allowed.  That gave him an advantage over his rivals.  He cheated.  Not only did he cheat, he lied about it.

But it’s not just the cheating and the lies, the Mayor’s family was also enriched in the process. Records indicate Mayor Furey’s campaign paid his son nearly $40,000 and the PAC contributed thousands more.

Those improprieties also cast a dark cloud over one of the most important decisions made by the Council under the Mayor’s tenure – the award of the emergency services contract. McCormick won.  Gerber lost and shuttered its doors.

What now? Should Mayor Furey resign?  Should he be recalled?  Should his son continue to serve on City and School Board Commissions?  Should we all just go quietly about our business and pretend nothing happened because we are too afraid to rock the boat or offend our neighbor?  Or should we loudly protest at City Hall and on social media?

So far, questions like this have mostly been met with silence from current and former City officials.  Some, however, have spoken out.  At the council meeting last night, Councilwoman Ashcraft requested concurrence from her colleagues to bring back an agenda item to discuss the removal of Patrick Furey Jr. from his post on the Traffic Commission.  Councilmember Griffith’s nodded his approval, but the request was quickly scuttled by Mayor Furey.

Of that exchange, Councilwoman Ashcraft would later say, “I know it was the right thing to do, in my world honesty and ethical behavior count.”  Former Councilmember and contender for the Mayor’s office, Bill Sutherland, offered his support of the action.  In an e-mail he commented that, “I would have seconded it [the motion] in a heartbeat. Torrance is more important than friendship or feelings.”

In contrast, Mayor Furey would clearly prefer the matter pass quickly and quietly into the night. Will the community allow that to occur?  What does the Mayor continuing to serve say about Torrance?  Does it mean we as a community condone cheating and lying?  Like Councilwoman Ashcraft, can we say that honesty and ethical behavior still count?

We are not Bell. Or are we?

It is no secret that Mayor Furey has had issues with local reporter Nick Green of the Daily Breeze.  It appeared for some time that he was boycotting the paper altogether and, at one point, he apparently even tried to have Green removed from his post. Those frustrations apparently have not dissipated as they appeared to boil over Tuesday night. Piggybacking on concerns expressed by a resident with regard to the fairness of the ambulance services contract award, Furey questioned the “fairness” of Nick Green’s reporting.

He initially seemed perturbed that Nick Green had sent City officials a litany of questions on the City’s off Friday.  Furey noted that he responded to that e-mail letting Nick Green know that staff would address the questions on Monday. Yet, before staff had a chance to respond, Furey complained that there still appeared a front page article over the weekend that “ran with all that information as a negative thing.”

He continued by saying “I’m just talking about fairness.  He didn’t ask the question of the people that could answer it because they were off that day.”

He also questioned the fairness of a statement in the article attributed to former mayoral candidate Tom Brewer who was quoted as saying that, “McCormick has never been in compliance with the contract.”  Furey rebutted that by stating, “as you can see from the agenda item as well as the supplemental material that they [McCormick] were in substantial compliance with absolutely every term of the contract.”

Furey also took aim at Green reporting that there were only two ambulances stationed within the City. He claimed that was “totally erroneous” as it was his understanding that there are seven stationed within the City even though only five are required per the contract.

He then lauded McCormick for their service to the City including in such dramatic instances as the tragic accident that occurred at St. James Catholic church last December resulting in four deaths and the refinery explosion in February.

He also labeled the article an “editorial” due to its lack of attribution.

Later, after a resident suggested he would like to see more quotes from those on the Council in the local paper, Mayor Furey retorted that “when you’re misquoted and taken out of context that it’s not going to happen.” He then explained that he had met with the publisher, the editor, and the managing editor and explained that to them.

He concluded his remarks by saying, “I will not be played a game like that.”

At the March 10, 2015 meeting the Council approved pooling the available Council travel budget for the remainder of this year.  At that same time, they also proposed increasing the allotted budget available to each councilmember in subsequent years.  Councilmembers Griffiths and Ashcraft opposed the measure.  The current non-local travel budget is $1,664 annually per Councilmember and $2,224 annually for the Mayor.  The move to pool the budget was precipitated by a trip the Mayor and Councilmember Weideman took in January to attend the winter meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors and meet with leadership from the Coast Guard.

The stated reason the item was brought up was because Weideman had gone over his allotted budget of $1,664 for the trip and needed to borrow funds that were unused from his fellow colleagues on the Council to get reimbursed. Weideman even recused himself from deliberating on the matter admitting that he was “nominally affected” by the result and noting that the “public needs to have a perception of trust and integrity in their leaders.”

Expense reports from the trip obtained last Thursday through a Public Records Act request revealed several irregularities. Weideman’s expense report was for $1636.84.  The total amount of Mayor Furey’s expense report was $2,416.76. The City travel policy adopted by the Council requires that a pre-trip travel request giving a cost estimate for the trip be approved a month prior to the planned travel date. The policy also requires that a final expense report be completed within 10 working days upon completion of the trip.

Per that policy, Mayor Furey’s expense report was completed on 28 January. Weideman’s expense report, however, was not prepared until 13 March – nearly two months after the travel date and four days after I submitted a public records request seeking the information on 09 March. The reason for the unusual delay in preparing the expense report was not explained.

In another peculiarity, the airfare for both Furey and Weideman was reported on Mayor Furey’s expense report. In the meeting, Mayor Furey indicated that they went really cheap on the airfare as his fare was purchased at regular price and it only cost $99 for Weideman’s additional ticket. That statement, however, does not appear to jive with the expense report.

Mayor Furey’s expense report included airfare charges in the amount of $714.60. That amount is consistent with what U.S. Airways (the airline taken by Furey and Weideman) is currently charging for two round-trip tickets from LA to DC.  Strangely, however, there were two airfare receipts.  One was for a roundtrip purchase for two in the amount of $653.40 with a returning flight on 23 January. A second receipt showed a one-way return flight purchased for 24 January making it appear the trip was extended by one day.  Oddly, that flight was purchased using 50,000 airline reward miles from an unknown source.  Only the $61.20 processing fee for using the airline miles, and the initial $653.40 roundtrip airfare, was expensed on the report.

The use of airline reward miles presents several questions. Whose rewards account did they come from? Why not just pay the additional fee to change flights?  Does utilizing reward miles in this way constitute a reportable gift under the Fair Political Practices Commission (FPPC) guidelines?

There were also two hotel receipts for Furey and Weideman – one for 19 -22 January and another for the extra day of the trip on 23 January.  The Capital Hilton charged them $314.88 a night for the 19^th– 22^nd and only $159.16 for that final Friday night on the 23^rd. The Travel Policy also provides a suggested dinner guideline of $30 and requires any variance to that guideline be documented by a written explanation.  Furey and Weideman exceeded that amount slightly on a few occasions and provided receipts but no written explanation for going beyond the guideline.

In opposing the pooling proposition, Griffiths expressed concern that the pooling was unfair as it would penalize those that hadn’t yet used their budget.  He also said pooling reduced the incentive for the Council to be cost conscious and rewarded those that traveled first and traveled more extravagantly.  As an alternative, he suggested that he would be willing to offer any unused funds in his budget at the conclusion of the fiscal year to anyone that had exceeded their budget.

The Council travel budget has not changed since fiscal year 2011-12, but it was as much as $7,500 per Councilmember and $10,000 for the Mayor in 2008-09. Any Councilmember can exceed the budgeted amount for travel with prior approval from the Council as Mayor Furey did just a few months ago for a trip to China. That trip, which was planned for last November, was approved with a budget of $5,000.  Why Mayor Furey and Councilman Weideman didn’t seek Council approval prior to exceeding the budget for their trip to DC, as Mayor Furey did for his trip to China, is something else left unexplained.

The approval to pool the remaining budget will allow the Mayor to attend another U.S. Conference of Mayors event in June without having to seek another travel budget increase from the Council.