Jerry Amante, Tustin Councilman, Has Grand Jury "Misfeasance in Office" Finding Marked With Call for His Head and Hiring as a Lobbyist

Amante

Hey, Tustin City Councilman (and former mayor) Jerry Amante: the grand jury beotch slaps you for "misfeasance in office" and "exceeding or misusing a public power or position and thereby risking harm" for lobbying a college president to force the resignation of a professor who exposed the massive amount of taxpayer funds spent to compensate Orange County public officials. What's next?

"I'm becoming a paid lobbyist!"

Yes, to further prove the old adage "scum rises to the top in Orange County," the grand jury releases its report excoriating Amante on June 28, and four days later FSB Core Strategies fires off a press release heralding Amante as its newest hire.

Amante is to be the senior vice president, general counsel and deputy managing director in the Irvine office of the "full service" public affairs, public relations and political consulting firm that also has offices in Sacramento and is owned by old GOP warhorse Curt Pringle's former lackey Jeff Flint.

Now, I still can't shake the moment from my mind when Amante--with members of Orange County Big Labor cheering him on--sarcastically berated foes as know-nothings as he publicly lobbied the feds on behalf of a plan to carve a private toll road into a public state park in South County. The then-chairman of the Transportation Corridor System Board of Directors argued the pursuit of the almighty dollar must trump concerns about fouling San Clemente's pristine shores.

Songstad

But the Orange County grand jury faulted Amante for something completely different. He and Laguna Hills City Councilman L. Allan Songstad Jr. were serving together as officers of the Orange County division of the League of California Cities and the break-away Association of California Cities-Orange County when they marched into Chapman University President James Doti's office.

Loaded for bear.

Before that meeting, Barbara Kogerman, who was running for a Laguna Hills City Council seat in 2010, suspected City Manager Bruce Channing was over-compensated. To prove this, she sought to find out how much administrators were paid in Orange County's 34 cities, which should be easy to figure out given it's supposedly public information. But what she discovered was a murky world where exact amounts are hidden in documents over-loaded with therefores, whereases and a little of the ol' voodoo economics. (Probably courtesy of tricks passed on by lobbyists. Just sayin'.) 

Kogerman

Kogerman needed help. To the rescue came Fred Smoller, director of the public administration graduate program at Brandman University, a Chapman school for working professionals. Smoller loaned Kogerman two graduate students for her project, thinking it would be a good public-administration exercise. They dug in and, thanks to numerous Public Records Act requests, discovered Channing, for a city with a population shy of 32,000, was earning more than $460,000 in total annual compensation, the highest among OC's city administrators, including those serving municipalities with more than triple the population.

Thanks to the media attention generated by the countywide compensation report, Kogerman would go on to win her council seat, the students would receive local, state and national honors and praise, and the shadowy sins of other cities would be exposed. The Los Angeles Times leapfrogged from Kogerman's report to look into public funding of administrators throughout Los Angeles County, resulting in the Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the Bell scandal.

Doti

Smoller's "prize" would come after Amante and Songstad met with Doti. The upshot: they were shocked, SHOCKED, that academic research would influence a local political campaign. They whined that Brandman U being mentioned on the cover of Kogerman's report and grad students Cindy Smith and Janice Voshall being listed as authors gave the appearance the private institution authorized the shaming of public officials (which, of course, is fine in Orange County so long as the public officials are elected Democrats other than Tom Daly).

Doti agreed with Amante and Songstad, and disapproving dialogue between the university, the councilmen and their nonprofit's executive staff would continue for months. Speaking of dialogue, anyone else wonder how Dialogue with Doti and Dodge is going to cover this? Or if they are going to cover this?

We digress. Facing the possible loss of his academic career, Smoller stepped down as the Brandman public administration program director, noting in his resignation letter that the Association of California Cities-Orange County and "other disgruntled elected leaders" had convinced Doti the professor "could no longer be an effective public face for the program."

The blowback to Smoller so infuriated Kogerman that she fired off a letter of her own, to the Orange County grand jury. And that resulted in the investigation that concluded:

City officials apparently misused their membership in a non-profit corporation established on behalf of public entities to promote their own political agenda by using their status with that organization in an effort to influence the officials at a local university.

City officials arranged a meeting with the office of a university president indicating they were to introduce the executive director of the non-profit entity, when their intentions were to influence the university to investigate and discredit the report where students were assigned as interns to a political campaign by the Masters in Public Administration department.

The influence wielded by city officials appears to have been an attempt to cause the officials of a local university, to exert influence on a member of their faculty.

City officials may not have been forthcoming with the Orange County Grand Jury in their testimony about the primary purpose in meeting with university officials and the facts and circumstances related thereto.

It wasn't difficult for the grand jury to conclude the councilmen and the nonprofit association had swayed Doti given language in their communications obtained by investigators showed the exact same language was used in Smoller's resignation letter.