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E-mail StoryPrice: Waiting for Weir to come clean on client names
| Tuesday, Mar 20 2007 10:55 PM
Last Updated: Tuesday, Mar 20 2007 11:04 PM
Admit it: Ken Weir's refusal to list his 12 most lucrative business clients has you wondering, at least a little bit.
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Weir
What ambitious developer has been writing him checks every month?
What doubt-provoking business relationship is tucked in his breast pocket?
We ought to know soon, now that Weir has declared his intention to comply with an order by the Fair Political Practices Commission to identify the dozen clients who paid his accounting firm at least $10,000 last year -- or explain in more satisfactory detail why he shouldn't have to.
We may end up saying, "So what? These are the people Weir risked his credibility for?" But Weir has given us just enough reason to doubt his judgment when it comes to separating his business associations from his obligations as a Bakersfield City Council member.
Of course, Weir's continuing reluctance to divulge the names of his clients may simply be a matter of misplaced priorities. Perhaps he's trying to honor business commitments at the expense of public-service commitments. If that's the case, here's some cold water: His obligations as an elected keeper of the public trust supercede all others.
Three months before taking office, Weir parted ways with longtime client Gordon Downs, a developer-land speculator who is now suing the city over its hillside development ordinance. We assumed -- at least I did, here -- that Weir would have to recuse himself from City Council decisions involving Downs. But he blundered ahead, participating in closed-door deliberations that focused on Downs, among others.
Only after his attorney advised him to sit out future deliberations involving Downs did Weir accept what most of us assumed was a given -- an elected representative can't take a position on a matter that has public-dollar implications if it directly affects a man who, until recently, was helping that representative make his car payments.
We wouldn't be surprised to find additional developers on Weir's list, should he deign to comply with the law and make it public. Besides restaurants, Weir's firm specializes in construction-industry clients.
It would have been so much better for Weir, newly named to the city's planning and development committee, to just come clean in the first place and avoid any potential "aha" moments. Now a state watchdog agency has demanded he do so, giving the whole affair the taint of impropriety.
It's not like Weir isn't familiar with government forms. He's been a certified public accountant for more than 25 years. That's a lot of number-crunching to satisfy bureaucratic curiosity. And yet Weir has always escaped this sort of scrutiny. How? Maybe his previous elected position, trustee for the Bakersfield City School District, warranted less attention.
Maybe it came down to Weir's choice of disclosure forms.
The proper document for the disclosure of individual income sources is the California Form 700, Schedule A-2, according to the FPPC. That's the form for stating income from a business where the public official's ownership interest is 10 percent or greater.
Weir has been using the A-2 to list his wife's antique/gift shop, but not his own accounting firm -- at least he didn't in his last 10 years as a BCSD trustee or more recently as a councilman. Instead, Weir has always listed his business, Weir & Associates, on Schedule C, the form more properly used to state one's total, overall income and position within the company. That form has no place to list single-income sources.
Oversight? Different interpretation of the regulations? Who knows? A cursory glance at the disclosure addendums used by trustees from various local school districts shows widespread inconsistency.
We do know this: All of this matters more than ever because Bakersfield is at a development crossroads. Kern County planners, for perhaps the first time, are demanding that new development stop outpacing infrastructure -- a clear sign that some in local government understand what we've been doing to ourselves.
Will city officials follow suit? We'll see. Either way, we have a right to know what (or who) might be influencing the decisions of the people who control our future.
Robert Price's column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Reach him at 395-7399 or rprice@bakersfield.com.