Police Investigate Plan to Derail Project

By Jorge Casuso and Oliver Lukacs
Staff Writers

August 20 -- Councilman Robert Holbrook filed a complaint with the Police Department last month after former Planning Commissioner Kelly Olsen informed him that a council member and a top planning official had successfully urged him to take part in a plan to derail a major project, The Lookout has learned.

Lt. Frank Fabrega, the police department spokesman, confirmed Tuesday that police had investigated Holbrook's complaint, but he said, "None of the allegations constituted a crime that the District Attorney's Office could file."

Both Holbrook and the police declined to release the names of the council member and planning official.

Holbrook told The Lookout that Olsen called him hours before his failed bid for reappointment on July 8 to inform him of the nearly four-year-old plan to miss a Planning Commission meeting in an effort to stall a proposed office building. Two other commissioners had been called and urged not to attend the meeting, Holbrook said Olsen told him.

Olsen and the two other commissioners missed the October 27, 1999 meeting -- which was postponed for lack of a quorum -- jeopardizing the Development Permit for the Maguire Partners office building on Ocean Avenue, which was set to expire on December 31.

The commission eventually approved the project adjacent to the RAND property purchased by the City after attorneys for the developer threatened to take legal action.

"He (Olsen) said that one of the elected council members and staff (member) called him with a plan asking him not to attend the Planning Commission meeting so there wouldn't be a quorum," Holbrook said. "He went along with the plan.

"He said that he participated and he regretted it," Holbrook said. "He mentioned that he believed there was corruption within the planning process and he wanted to expose that corruption. It turned out he exposed himself as well… He said that he was a part of it, that he deliberately missed the meeting. That was okay with Mr. Olsen."

Holbrook said he referred the complaint to the police department. "I didn't think it was appropriate for a commissioner to thwart the process and prevent the right to a hearing," Holbrook said.

Olsen -- who declined to discuss details of the call or reveal the names of the council member and planning official -- said he did not expect Holbrook would take the issue to the police.

"I did not ask him to go to the police. I made no suggestion to him to go to the police," Olsen said. "I hoped that he would talk to the City Attorney and his colleagues (on the council) and try to establish rules and tell council members that this is not the proper thing to do.

“My goal is to make sure this kind of behind-the-scenes stuff doesn’t continue, to make certain that a planning commissioner or any commissioner is not interfered with or pressured to deny any applicant their rights or due process,” Olsen said.

It is questionable whether the alleged plan is a violation under the Brown Act, and even if it were, the statute of limitations for Brown Act violations is 90 days, according to legal experts consulted by The Lookout.

At this point, legal action would likely have to be taken by Maguire Partners, an unlikely event since the developer successfully built the project.

The 70,000-square-foot office building made headlines in late 1999, as developers raced against the clock to win final approval from the commission, which was hearing an appeal of the Architectural Review Board's approval.

The proposed project piqued media interest because the city had expressed interest in buying the prominently situated three-quarter acre site facing Ocean Avenue to round out the purchase of 11.3 acres of the RAND property it had offered to buy for $53 million.

Attorneys for Maguire Partners laid the groundwork for a potential lawsuit by claiming in a letter to former City Manager John Jalili that City officials had deliberately dragged their feet in an effort to kill the project, which had been in the works since 1990.