By Robert Haugh

It looks like Santa Clara News Online (SCNO) has readers in Southern California.

Last month, SCNO ran a story about City Attorney Glen Googins ignoring conflict of interest charges against 49ers CEO Al Guido for signing contracts on behalf of the City’s Stadium Authority with FIFA.

Then, information started coming in from Chula Vista. That’s the city near San Diego where Googins served as City Attorney before coming to Santa Clara.

Googins was criticized in 2015 when Steve Miesen was appointed to the Chula Vista City Council to fill a vacancy.

When he was appointed, Miesen was a Division Manager of Republic Services, the sole provider of trash pick-up, recycling, and management of a landfill for Chula Vista.  

The issue of conflict of interest was raised and Googins had to give his advice.

Googins was criticized in an editorial in La Prensa, an award-winning San Diego publication:

In this instance, the City Attorney provided the council members the cover they needed to make the appointment. The City Attorney, Glen Googins, took a very narrow view, looking at only the financial disclosure form, and stated that because the city contract with Republic Services, where Miesen serves as Division Manager, would not come up in the next two years, that he was good to go.

We see two problems with this legal opinion by Googins: First, Googins is an elected official whose primary role is to provide the citizens of Chula Vista with legal representation that reflects the best interest of the city, not the city council’s personal yes man. Secondly, if Googins had looked beyond the financial disclosure form and looked into the Conflict of Interest publication issued by the California Attorney General, he would have found plenty of code violations that the appointment represented. But he didn’t and as such never brought those issues before the city. Googins failed the citizens of Chula Vista in this instance.

That criticism sounds a lot like the complaints about how Googins is handling the Guido issue.

According to our sources, a former Chula Vista City Council candidate filed complaints with the FPPC against Googins and Miesen.

That action prohibited Miesen from participating in some votes.

Here’s a 2015 FPPC letter that informs Googins and Miesen that the Councilmember cannot participate in a vote on a development project.

Accordingly, we conclude that the Act prohibits the Councilmember from taking part in the decision on whether to approve the development because the decision will have a reasonably foreseeable material financial effect on his interest in Republic. 

Nine years later, some of the same issues are coming up in Santa Clara.

Since the public complaints about Googins in the Mission City, he has indicated that he may need to take a closer look at the Guido situation.

Googins changed his approach after the San Franciso Chronicle called him for a story that also reported that the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s office is looking into the issue.