Stanford Report, Jan. 14, 2004
Potential remedy for conflict case looms
BY BARBARA PALMER
When Vice Provost LaDoris Cordell assumed her seat on the Palo Alto City Council on Jan. 1, it became illegal for the city and the university to make or renegotiate contracts with each other. But an effort to exempt Stanford from an arcane conflict of interest law is moving its way through the State Senate.
The university and Palo Alto currently are engaged in dozens of contracts, ranging from small matters, like the maintenance of the traffic signals on Palm Drive and the hiring of extra police service at football games, to large ones, like fire protection and last summer's offer to lease 6 acres of Stanford land to the city for community soccer fields.
The law, Section 1090, exempts public officials who are officers or employees of nonprofit corporations, which includes most California colleges and universities. Stanford, however, was organized as a nonprofit trust with corporate powers, so the exemption does not apply. Another provision, which exempts public officials who have been officers or employees of corporations for more than three years, also does not apply. Cordell became vice provost for campus relations in March 2001.
On Jan. 5, State Sen. Byron Sher, D-Stanford, a professor emeritus of law, introduced Senate Bill 1086, which would widen the exemption to include "nonprofit, tax-exempt entities." An analysis prepared by the Senate Local Government Committee staff described the proposed amendment as "consistent with the existing policy that an agency's contractual relationship with a nonprofit doesn't result in a conflict of interest." Another conflict of interest law, which prevents Cordell from voting or participating in city council decisions involving Stanford, is unaffected.
On Jan. 8, the Senate invoked state constitutional provisions that allow legislators to act on the bill immediately, rather than the 31 days usually required. Attorneys from Stanford and Palo Alto Mayor Bern Beecham plan to speak in favor of the amendment at a committee hearing in Sacramento today.
If the Senate and the Assembly both "act with dispatch," the bill could become law before March, said Larry Horton, director of government and community relations. University and city lawyers had worked independently before the end of the last year to make sure that documentation on existing contracts would allow them to operate smoothly in the interim, he said.
The effort to widen the exemption to make contracts between the university and the city has been a "painless project" for her, since lawyers for Stanford and Palo Alto have taken the lead, Cordell said.
The conflict of interest law took her by surprise, said Cordell, a 1974 graduate of Stanford Law School. In six years as a practicing lawyer and more than two decades as a judge, Cordell never heard of he law, nor did it come up in the contracts class she took as a first-year law student. Byron Sher was her contract law professor.
