In the midst of wetlands land swap negotiations, Long Beach’s public works director gave his personal e-mail address to developer Tom Dean. Why?

PHOTO by RUSS ROCA

For months, multi-millionaire developer Tom Dean had asked for stuff from Long Beach Public Works director Mike Conway. Lots of stuff. (You might have a hard time believing how much stuff.) But that’s the way it’s played in big-stakes, hardball negotiations, and the men were bargaining over a massive private-public land swap: 175 acres of the Los Cerritos Wetlands owned by Dean in exchange for a vast array of developable property owned by Long Beach taxpayers and represented by Conway.

Then, on Oct. 21, 2008, at 3:17 p.m., Dean asked Conway for one more thing:

“do you have a personal email?” Dean inquired, punctuating the question exactly this way in the subject line of an e-mail sent from his own account and providing no other reason or context in the body of the letter—simply sending the blunt inquiry to Conway’s official city of Long Beach e-mail address.

If that request seems strange or improper—a sudden and unexplained step outside the official and traceable channel the men had been using to handle their business for the better part of a year—it doesn’t seem to have fazed Conway. Just 18 minutes after Dean posed his question, Conway sent his reply—and his personal e-mail address.

“Hmmm. I think it’s MPConway@earthlink.net,” the senior city official wrote in a message sent at 3:35 p.m. “Maybe I should fire up the computer tonight and confirm.”

At 4:35 p.m., Dean responded to Conway, this time putting two terse and inscrutable sentences in the body of his e-mail.

“Let me know,” the wealthy developer wrote to the public servant. “I sent you something.”

What did Dean send to Conway’s personal e-mail account on that October afternoon? A joke? An e-card? An invitation to coffee? An invitation for Conway to travel somewhere on Dean’s private aircraft, perhaps?

It’s impossible to know for sure—so far, anyway. That piece of correspondence was not included in the hundreds of pages of city documents obtained by The District Weekly. Personal e-mail accounts don’t automatically fall into the category of public records, although they can, with the help of the courts.

But it’s essential to know, for sure. Not so much because of how the contents might reflect on Dean—everybody who knows this wealthy and powerful man knows he’s just trying to get richer and more influential. But because of how those contents might reflect on the controversial decisions Conway has made during his negotiations with Dean.

The original massive land-swap that was conceived a year ago, which revolved around a parkland-for-wetlands centerpiece—29 acres that were long promised for a mid-city sports park plus other assorted properties in exchange for 175 of Dean’s pristine wetlands—was separated into two deals last December when Dean couldn’t secure financing to complete his purchase of sports-park-adjacent land currently owned by Amerigas. The first, involving city-owned property near the port, was approved by the city council on Feb. 10. Negotiations on the second are ongoing.

Conway is supposed to be looking out for the well-being of Long Beach residents, who have incalculable millions of dollars of their money, land, future commitments and even quality of life on the line. His relationship with Dean is supposed to be purely professional.

So why did Dean ask for Conway’s personal e-mail address? And why did Conway give it?

“I don’t really recall the context in which he requested that,” Conway said in a telephone interview March 13. “But I didn’t see any particular reason not to provide it to him. I don’t keep it a secret. There are a number of people who have my personal e-mail address.”

Hopefully, none of those other people are negotiating with Conway on valuable and sensitive city business. According to a quick and informal survey of other city officials in and around Long Beach, that’s not the way it’s supposed to be played in big-stakes, hardball negotiations. They unanimously said such behavior is unprofessional and appears unethical.

And what did Dean send to Conway’s personal address?

“Nothing. The only e-mail I received from Mr. Dean was an e-mail asking, ‘Did you receive this?’ ” Conway said. “I have not received any other personal e-mail from Mr. Dean.”

So no jokes or e-cards. How about anything else of value? Conway acknowledges he’s heard people are saying he took a trip on Dean’s private jet. The District Weekly was told that, too, by a reliable source close to city government.

“That’s a fascinating theory out there, but no,” Conway said. “My relationship with Mr. Dean has been strictly professional. On a number of occasions we have met over coffee. He may have bought my coffee six times and I may have bought his coffee four times—so he may be up by two cups. But coffee is the only financial transaction that has occurred between us. I wouldn’t ever put myself in a compromising position.”

Apparently, Conway doesn’t believe that by sending his personal e-mail address to Dean—which effectively established a back channel for off-the-public-record communication—he already did.

Presumably, the Long Beach City Council didn’t know about any of this on Feb. 10 when it voted 6-2 to give Dean 12.1 acres of port-adjacent city property in exchange for 33.77 acres of open-except-for-oil-wells space in the Los Cerritos Wetlands area. The council members’ behavior played into it, however.

The six council members who approved the trade—Suja Lowenthal, Gary DeLong, Patrick O’Donnell, Dee Andrews, Tonia Reyes Uranga, Val Lerch—seemed so anxious to get the deal done and off the public radar that they permitted Conway and city manager Pat West to complete the contract’s language and have it signed without further review. They specifically voted not to have them bring the finalized document back to council first. Once again: they voted not to know what is in the contract.

Maybe it wouldn’t have made a difference, anyway. The majority seemed untroubled by weird aspects of the deal that Conway outlined in a PowerPoint presentation that night, like that there was no appraisal of Dean’s property, no pressure on Dean to permit such an appraisal and no questions about why Dean gets to keep the oil rights—the only characteristic of the property that has earned him any money since he began buying up wetlands property with highly leveraged loans in 2002. There was also no appraisal of the city property—the Public Service Yard—and the fact that another party had made a higher bid on that property was shrugged off. It was never determined how much of the massive bill to clean up environmental contamination on both sites will eventually fall to the taxpayers.

The two council members who voted against the swap—Gerrie Schipske and Rae Gabelich—said they were worried that the deal was so lacking in quantifiable facts and enforceable guarantees that it might ultimately play out as a gift of public funds. That’s illegal.

The terms and tone of the deal so disturbed Long Beach resident Thomas Marchese that he filed a public records request with the Long Beach city attorney seeking copies of the communication among the people that structured it. Marchese received hundreds of pages of e-mails and allowed The District Weekly to make copies.

Among many other revelations, the documents show Conway shared at least one of the concerns of council members Schipske and Gabelich: during the course of negotiations beginning in February 2008, he sometimes worried, too, that the deal he was structuring with Dean might be getting perilously close to the legal line.

“We can’t withstand a ‘gift of public funds’ fight,” he warned Dean in an e-mail sent June 27, 2008, at 9:45 a.m., after the developer made his latest push to acquire more city property in exchange for his wetlands.

For the most part, however, allusions by Conway to his role as a representative of the people’s best interests were few. As with the one just mentioned, most of them focused on meeting the minimum legal, political and public-relations standards. He writes several times of seeking a “defensible” deal.

The negotiations were kept secret for months—until revealed by The District Weekly in early November—not only by Dean and Conway, but also by other city staff and elected officials, including Mayor Bob Foster and Third District City Councilman Gary DeLong. More troubling is that this below-the-radar activity also included former city manager-turned-lobbyist Jerry Miller—who has been selling Dean his intimate knowledge of official processes and personal connections at city hall.

The tone of Conway’s e-mails oozes insiderism. Rather than matching Dean’s aggressiveness so as to get the best possible deal for his clients—the taxpayers—Conway’s e-mails show consistent concern for Dean’s objectives and timetables. Conway constantly reassures Dean that the mayor is on board, fastidiously controls what information gets to which city council members and keeps Dean’s camp up to date on likely council support. It’s as though they’re working as a team.

Dean’s initial list of demands for the 175 acres of wetlands—as presented to Conway in a May 27, 2008, e-mail was pretty outrageous. He wanted:

• The east Police Athletic League building at 1201 Freeman
• A two-thirds-acre yard on Esther Street and two more small Wes Pac lots in this area
• An oil well and a half acre on Spring
• Thirty feet of right-of-way in front of a Home Depot off Atlantic Blvd.
• A lot in Lookout Park
• A piece of the oil operators property on Spring
• Three billboards
• Boy Scout property
• Five acres of the SCE yard at Studebaker and Second Street
• Thirty-seven acres of the sports park

Documents indicate that Conway only told one Long Beach elected official about this proposal—Mayor Bob Foster—and that the mayor and Conway thought it best to keep the city council in the dark . . . even council members Tonia Reyes Uranga and Gary DeLong, whose districts included most of the land being discussed.

“Just had a briefing with the Mayor et al. He’s all on board, loves the idea,” Conway wrote to Dean on May 30 at 11:24 a.m. “He didn’t like handing over the signboard sites, so we have to work through that problem. He wants us to quietly move things along while he’s on vacation. In that regard, I think discussion with Uranga and DeLong (and Oil Operators but that’s my deal) need to be delayed for a short time.”

Conway’s standard for a deal was revealed in an e-mail he sent to Dean on June 5, 2008, at 2 p.m. Most of the communiqué lays out the riches that are awaiting Dean—in this particular scenario, $20 million cash, $30 million worth of developable property and a lifetime revenue stream (currently $500,000 annually) from oil operations. The last sentence summarizes Conway’s bottom line for taxpayers: “I’ve got a defensible deal (barely),” he writes.

Later that day, Dean e-mailed Conway at 3:15 p.m. to ask if the city had any waste asphalt he could spread on his property. Conway appears to drop everything to tend to the request—as if responding to a boss. At 4:25 p.m., Conway e-mailed his underlings in the Public Works Department to ask if they could arrange to deliver some waste asphalt to Dean. “Perhaps contractors can use this as a short haul route for bidding purposes?” he suggests to them.

About a half-hour later, Conway seems to get a little nervous about what he has done. At 5:11 p.m., he e-mails Dean: “So, Tom, I’m wondering . . . how is Coastal [the Coastal Commission] and conservationists going to look at this? Remember when you mentioned the Bixby’s draining some wetlands? How will laying down petroleum products around the wetlands be perceived? How would the city be perceived in providing the material? I may be all paranoid, but I know they’re out there.”

During his March 13 phone interview with The District Weekly, Conway insisted the waste asphalt was never trucked to Dean’s land.

“Ultimately, it was decided that it was not the best thing—because we are under such scrutiny—that we should partner with Tom in that regard,” Conway said.

No e-mails included in the public records request support this, however.

As behind-the-scenes negotiations brought the deal into clearer focus in mid-autumn, Dean and Conway began to prepare a strategy for its public presentation—how to maximize its attractiveness to politicians and minimize the objections of citizens.

At 8:07 a.m. on Oct. 14, while Dean was getting his paperwork together, he sent off an e-mail to Conway wondering why there was no appraisal on the sports park acreage. “Am I missing it?” he asks.

“Nope, there are no appraisals,” Conway writes back at 8:11 a.m., and then he lets Dean know why: “I purposely avoided appraisals so that value was not the primary focus of the trade.”

Four months later, this strategy would enable council members to cast votes in favor of the deal while poetically extolling the priceless value of a natural resource like the wetlands. Of course, many of those same council members had previously voted to put a Home Depot on the edge of those same wetlands.

When The District Weekly asked Conway why he avoided appraisals of city property, he explained it was necessary “because we can’t appraise the wetlands property. To have a value on one property doesn’t do the negotiation any value, because you can’t compare it to the wetlands.”

Turns out that “can’t” is a funny word in that context. What it means is that Dean refused to allow a delineation study and appraisal of his wetlands property because it almost certainly would have lowered its value in a trade. He was negotiating fiercely for his best interests.

Unfortunately, Conway did not display the same kind of aggressiveness on behalf of taxpayers. There is no evidence he ever pressed Dean for a wetlands appraisal. And he didn’t mention public documents that reveal the worth of nearby wetlands—the $14 million appraisal on the 66-acre Bryant property in 2003 and the $6 million paid for 100 acres of Hellman property in 2008.

When the big deal temporarily fell through in early winter, city officials got to work on another plan, according to a Christmas Day e-mail from Dean.

“I had lunch with Gary DeLong after our meeting and he is fully supportive of the plan to break the deal into two pieces . . . Gary confirmed that Bob Foster is also supportive of the truncated deal.”

Within a month, they got it done—although just to make sure, former city manager Jerry Miller (now Dean’s lobbyist) had this little exchange with Conway on Jan. 30, 2009, a few days before the land swap came to the council:

Miller to Conway: “Are there five votes to approve Tuesday’s request?”

Conway to Miller: “We’re counting five, maybe six in pocket.”

The final vote was 6-2. These guys are good.

Tags: gary delong, Long Beach, Los Cerritos Wetlands, Mayor Bob Foster, Mike Conway, Tom Dean