Press Ent now asks if Berry going Face Trial?

10:00 PM PDT on Tuesday, July 21, 2009
CASSIE MACDUFF

Who would have suspected Grand Terrace harbored such dark secrets?
A high-ranking official once accused of embezzling city funds?
A boss who swept the matter under the rug, never telling the council?
A councilman voting repeatedly to buy city ads in his wife's newspaper?

The sordid mess all came spilling out of long-secret investigations while the former city manager and his one-time protégé competed bitterly for a job.

Neither will now get the job, and the smoldering wreckage left behind will have to be extinguished by a council rocked by a felony conflict-of-interest charge against one of its members.

Start with the matter of former city manager Tom Schwab, who was sidelined by a health problem in June 2008, and Steve Berry, his ex-protege who took over while Schwab was ill.
As the men battled for the city manager post, someone leaked a November 2002 investigation of alleged embezzlement by Berry while he supervised a work-release inmate.

The inmate, according to the report, was in business with a former Grand Terrace city employee. Berry signed off on time sheets that showed the inmate working when he wasn't.

When a judge sentences an inmate to work instead of jail, he's supposed to actually do the work to pay his debt to society. Berry's work-release inmate had five buddies helping him. I don't think the judge would approve.

If Berry wanted the man to work different hours, all he had to do was inform the Glen Helen Work-Release Program. "They can change the schedule at their own will, but they need to notify us," said Sgt. Larry Jarvis, who trains work-release supervisors.

The inmate got a no-bid job to tint the City Hall windows. The investigation says he took tools and supplies the city paid for.

Schwab told me he now wishes he hadn't swept the case under the rug. He should have fired Berry and let the DA prosecute. And he should have informed the council.

I asked prosecutor John Goritz if the case can be revived, since there's no statute of limitations on embezzlement of public funds. He couldn't comment.

The most disturbing thing in the report was that the inmate worked after hours in the city child care center alone with a woman city employee who wasn't told he was a work-release inmate.
The woman told the investigator the man talked all the time and made her nervous.

I looked up his court records. The charge was domestic violence, plea-bargained down to assault.
As for Councilman Jim Miller, accused of voting on $18,000 worth of city advertising in his wife's paper, he didn't return my call.

But he told the DA's investigator he called the city attorney before his wife bought the newspaper and its building, "because I thought there would be a conflict."

The city attorney assured him "as long as it's her sole and separate property there shouldn't be a problem," Miller is quoted as saying.

City Attorney John Harper said Miller never asked him about a conflict of interest; he consulted him only about whether the ban on council members buying real estate in the city barred his wife from a purchase.

I asked Fair Political Practices Commission spokesman Roman Porter and Bob Stern of the Center for Governmental Studies whose responsibility it is to make sure elected officials understand conflict-of-interest laws.

Both said it's the elected official's.

Reach Cassie MacDuff at 951-368-9470 or cmacduff@PE.