Westin's Spending Sparks Uproar

By AMANDA COVARRUBIAS and MARGARET TALEV

June 30, 2002 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITERS

A month after he was awarded a new contract and a $30,000 raise, Ventura County Community College District Chancellor Philip Westin has found himself at the center of a political firestorm over charges of excessive spending.

During a four-year period, Westin was reimbursed $119,400 for business-related expenses, from $1,600 for a custom car phone to 75 cents for a pack of breath mints, according to district expense reports.

Last week, Westin sat silently through a two-hour verbal whipping by dozens of angry critics who jammed a board of trustees meeting to call for his resignation.

The board itself is also being targeted for failing to rein in Westin’s spending and granting him the new four-year contract, which takes effect Monday and will pay him $203,000 a year. For six years, critics point out, the chancellor took full advantage of a policy that placed no limits on his spending.

“They abdicated their power,” said Don Facciano, president of the Ventura County Taxpayers Assn., referring to the trustees. “The board majority neglected to monitor [Westin’s] spending. Shame on them. They were elected to that office and had a duty to perform. We’re asking for accountability. People feel they’ve been had.”

While apologizing for his conduct and vowing to change his ways, Westin has launched a counterattack. He contends that this still unfolding tale of power and money is rooted in an attempt by a Camarillo law firm to oust him and gain control of a lucrative contract with the district.

“If I had done something wrong, I’d be in jail right now,” said Westin, the son of a Presbyterian minister. “If you live a life of integrity, you’ve got to do more than just talk about it. That’s how I’m able to sleep at night.”

Westin filed a complaint in April with the State Bar of California, accusing the firm of Wood & Bender of “unethical conduct” in an effort to obtain the district’s legal services contract, which last year totaled more than $900,000.

“With me gone, a huge impediment to Mr. [David] Bender’s assuming the district’s legal work would be out of the way,” Westin wrote in his complaint.

Repeated calls to the law firm last week for a response to Westin’s allegations were not returned.

In an earlier interview, however, David Wood maintained that the law firm had acted appropriately in the matter. He provided The Times a copy of a letter dated June 18 from the state bar, stating that an initial review of Westin’s complaint found “there was insufficient grounds for disciplinary action.”

Westin’s 57-page complaint paints a scathing picture of a troubled college district whose administrators and trustees--three of whom face reelection this year--are still struggling to dig their way out of an ever-deepening political sinkhole. But Westin said last week that he has no intention of resigning.

He said he believes that he and a majority of the trustees can weather the storm and win back the public’s trust. Trustee John Tallman was the only board member to vote against renewing Westin’s contract.

“I apologize for the things I’ve done because it has cast doubt, from the point of view of the community, on whether I or the board are good custodians of public funds,” Westin said. “I regret that a great deal. But for the rest of my tenure here I’m going to do things differently.”

Friendly Meeting

The chancellor’s troubles began last December when Bender asked to meet with trustee Bob Gonzales. The two had known each other for years. They played golf together, talked football and confided about their personal lives.

“He was a person I considered to be a very good friend,” Gonzales said last week.

Bender, a former trustee himself, supported the Santa Paula police chief’s first run for the college board in 1996. He raised money for Gonzales’ campaign and served as an advisor.

At their December meeting, Bender offered up some disturbing news. Tipped off about Westin’s spending habits by an unnamed source, Bender told Gonzales that his law firm had conducted a preliminary survey using public records and found that the chancellor had run up thousands of dollars in questionable expenses.

“Dave says he’s got information on Phil, and says, in his mind, he may be ripping off the district, committing fraud, doing things in an illegal fashion,” Gonzales said. “I said, ‘Tell me more.’ ”

Over the next two months, Bender continued to update Gonzales on his firm’s probe of the chancellor. Wood and Bender had already hired Long Beach-based Gailey Associates, a private investigations firm, to look into Westin’s expenditures, according to the firm’s own documents.

Gonzales said he had every reason to trust Bender, who had served as a trustee with the district from 1979 to 1987 and as its general counsel from 1996 to 1998. In recent years, Gonzales tried to help his friend by getting the district to hire Bender’s law firm for legal work.

“I owe Dave big time,” Gonzales would often tell Westin, according to the chancellor’s complaint to the bar. “If it weren’t for David Bender, I wouldn’t be in this chair.”

Last February, Gonzales arranged for a meeting between Bender and board President Norman Nagel to discuss Westin’s expenses. Concerned about what he heard, Nagel said he called a closed-door meeting of the trustees to hear a full presentation by Bender and Wood.

The meeting was scheduled for March 6, a day after county voters approved a $356-million bond measure to pay for improvements at the college district’s three campuses. Westin was not invited.

Before making their presentation, Wood and Bender told the trustees that “they were the board’s attorneys” on this matter, which some members questioned, according to Westin’s complaint to the state bar.

Nagel said he was confused about the relationship the board had with Wood and Bender, given that they had not hired them in this matter. Nevertheless, the trustees went along with their advice, Nagel said.

Wood and Bender persuaded the board that the board’s attorney, Jack Lipton, should leave the room, suggesting he could be implicated in the allegations against Westin, Nagel said. Lipton advised the trustees to adjourn until they could hire an independent attorney.

The board ignored Lipton’s advice and excused him from the meeting, a decision that Nagel would later describe as “the biggest mistake, as president, I ever made.”

Then Wood and Bender dropped the bombshell, a 3-inch-thick report, detailing $119,000 of business-related expenses that the chancellor had charged to the district between December 1997 and October 2001. In all, the audit found $46,000 in “questionable expenses,” essentially those lacking receipts or adequate documentation.

They included $22,300 for car repairs, $12,700 for equipment and supplies, $7,600 for computer software, $1,600 for travel upgrades and $1,700 for miscellaneous. The report also revealed that Westin was reimbursed $23,000 for business meals from 1999 to 2001, but these overall expenses were not listed as questionable.

Bender told the trustees that Westin’s purchases should be further investigated to determine whether they constituted fraud, theft or embezzlement, according to several board members. Bender urged them to act quickly, Nagel recalled.

“David [Bender] said to us, ‘Now that you know, you will become culpable--possibly criminally--because there’s a question of what did you know and when did you know it,’ ” Nagel said. “I know squat about the legal profession, so I’m thinking, ‘Holy cow!’ ”

Resignation Urged

When the meeting adjourned, Nagel met with Westin in his office and urged him to resign on the spot. Stunned, Westin said that he demanded an explanation but Nagel offered none.

Westin refused to step down. He met with Nagel again the following morning in the chancellor’s office to find out why the board was so upset with him. Westin recalled the meeting in his complaint to the state bar:

“I said to him that I didn’t know what was going on,” Westin wrote. “At that point, [Nagel] collapsed into a chair, heaving and sobbing. He said he couldn’t talk to me.”

A few days later, Nagel called another closed-door trustees meeting for March 12 to discuss an evaluation of the chancellor. The board told Westin at that time that it planned to hire an independent auditor to review Bender’s report.

“That was the first time that I had any sort of confirmation that the issue was related to my expense reimbursements,” Westin wrote to the state bar. “I told them I would cooperate fully--that my conscience was absolutely clear.”

But Westin also wrote that he became angry during the meeting, suggesting that perhaps he should leave the room so the board’s attorney could “explain what ‘constructive wrongful termination’ was and what kind of lawsuit they would have had on their hands had I resigned” on March 6.

“You guys better wake up and smell the roses,” Westin stated in his complaint to the bar, although admitting that “it was a stupid thing to say.” He said he later apologized to board members for his outburst.

Westin wrote that he then told the board about his own observations of David Bender, who he said “liked to frighten and intimidate board members.”

Westin said it was Bender who recommended that Westin apply for the chancellor’s job when both men worked for Coast Community College District. Westin was then president of Golden West College in Huntington Beach and Bender was that district’s general counsel.

Westin said he believed Bender was instrumental in lobbying Tallman’s support for him in his successful bid for the position. Before he started his new job in January 1996, Westin wrote in his complaint, Bender contacted him and “made it clear that I owed him and that what he wanted was to become general counsel.”

Bender was eventually hired to represent the district, but Westin said he had no influence over the board’s decision. “I didn’t stand up and object, either,” he added.

In his complaint, Westin said he became disillusioned with both Bender and Tallman, both of whom he said were constantly telling him what they thought should be done in the district. “My role, in Mr. Bender and Tallman’s mind, was simply to do what they directed,” Westin wrote in his complaint.

Later, Westin said, he began questioning expenses submitted by Bender’s law firm. District records indicate that legal fees jumped from about $69,000 in the 1995-1996 fiscal year to more than $527,000 in 1996-1997. That figure has nearly doubled in the current fiscal year, which ends June 30.

Westin said that before he could take his concerns to the board, Bender announced that he was leaving the district to go to work for a software company. The chancellor wrote in his complaint that he was relieved that “we didn’t have to get into a showdown with Mr. Bender.”

After Bender left the software company, he formed a partnership with Camarillo attorney David Wood. “I was contacted around that time by Mr. Bender who informed me that he wanted to return to the district as general counsel,” Westin wrote in his complaint. He told Bender that the district was happy with Lipton as its attorney.

Audit Clears Westin

Since the controversy erupted, the district’s independent auditor has released a report that Westin said exonerates him. “In summary, our review of the facts did not disclose the existence of any criminal activity as related to the employee reimbursement claims,” the auditor concluded.

But Tallman disputes the report’s findings, saying that it was not a real audit but a surface-level examination of Westin’s expenses. “I wanted a more thorough report,” he said.

Meanwhile, the district is involved in a dispute over a $61,000 bill submitted by Wood and Bender’s firm for their investigative work. In a claim filed with the district in May, they said that their report on Westin was authorized by Gonzales.

But Gonzales said he never authorized the study, noting that the private investigator hired by Bender had submitted its request for Westin’s expenditures on Sept. 14. He said he told Bender repeatedly that, as a trustee acting alone, “I don’t have the authority to hire you.”

“I feel betrayed and used,” Gonzales said. “I’m mad at myself for falling into a trap, for being gullible.”

Feeling betrayed by the board, Westin told the members he wasn’t sure he wanted to stay on as chancellor. He later changed his mind and hired a lawyer to renegotiate the terms of his contract.

New Spending Policy

Despite Westin’s spending habits, trustees voted 4 to 1 on May 28 to grant Westin a new four-year contract and a 16% raise. The trustees are in the process of establishing a new spending policy for the chancellor.

Defending their action, board members said they felt Westin’s previous salary was not in line with other chancellors’ of comparable-sized districts.

They also worried that the newly approved bond financing and construction plans might collapse if he quit.

Westin and trustees are not out of the woods yet. In addition to Tallman, Nagel and trustee Art Hernandez will face reelection in November.

Allan Jacobs, who joined in voting to extend Westin’s contract, will not be up for reelection until 2004.

The district attorney’s office has told Westin it does not intend to investigate him because there is no apparent evidence of a crime.

But the chancellor must still convince the public, faculty members and community leaders that he can be an effective leader despite the outcry for his resignation.

Herbert Gooch, chairman of the political science department at Cal Lutheran University, said voters often have short memories.

But this fiasco may resonate through the November elections, he said, because of the public’s disgust with high-profile financial scandals, such as Enron and WorldCom.

“Just because they’re elected doesn’t mean they’re the most savvy people in the world,” Gooch said of the college trustees.

“But if you’re in your job long enough you ought to know about these things. To say they were naive about politics strikes sort of hollow to me.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Chancellors’ Salaries and Expenses at Comparable College Districts

District: Contra Costa

Students: 31,780

Colleges: 3

Chancellor’s Salary: $226,000

Car Allowance: None

Housing Stipend: None

Expense Policy: Vice chancellor must approve chancellor’s meals and travel; meal limits are $10 for breakfast, $17.50 for lunch, $35 for dinner.

District: Rancho Santiago

Students: 30,276

Colleges: 2

Chancellor’s Salary: $175,500

Car Allowance: $668/mo.

Housing Stipend: None

Expense Policy: Vice chancellor or a college president must approve chancellor’s expenses.

District: Coast

Students: 31,787

Colleges: 3

Chancellor’s Salary: $183,850

Car Allowance: None

Housing Stipend: None

Expense Policy: Trustees must grant prior approval for chancellor’s travel expenses and must approve meal reimbursements; all software and other equipment must be purchased through district’s business office.

District: Peralta

Students: 28,000

Colleges: 4

Chancellor’s Salary: $228,623

Car Allowance: See housing

Housing Stipend: $9,600/yr for car, housing and insurance

Expense Policy: Chancellor may approve most of own meals, travel and purchases; trustees must authorize international travel.

District: Ventura

Students: 25,716

Colleges: 3

Chancellor’s Salary: $203,000

Car Allowance: $1,150/mo.