SAN DIEGO — Dist. Atty. Paul Pfingst moved Tuesday to dismiss a civil misconduct charge filed by the county grand jury against Mayor Susan Golding stemming from her campaign to build a downtown baseball park to keep the Padres from leaving San Diego.
"If the mayor had done something that would require her removal from office, I would have prosecuted her in a New York minute," Pfingst said. "She didn't."
If brought to trial and convicted, Golding could have been dismissed from office.
But in a sharp rebuke to the grand jury, Pfingst said the jury's action, taken without seeking legal advice from his office, was both contrary to law and not supported by the facts. Pfingst's request that the case against the mayor be dropped will be considered Thursday by Presiding Judge Wayne Peterson.
"I'm pleased that the district attorney has arrived at a conclusion that I am factually innocent," said Golding, a two-term Republican. "It is not pleasant to be accused of something you didn't do."
Peter DiRenza, the retired Army counterintelligence officer who served as foreman of the 1998-99 grand jury, was neither surprised nor chagrined at Pfingst's action, which had been widely anticipated in legal and political circles.
"I'm not going to sing the blues over this," DiRenza said. "The grand jury did its job. We're proud of what we did, but we're out of the loop now. It was up to Paul Pfingst to carry the case from here."
The grand jury had invoked a little-known section of state law allowing it to level civil charges of misconduct against an elected official for actions that, while not criminal, are considered by jury members so damaging to the public interest that the official should be removed from office.
While the jury, whose 19 members are volunteers, can level such charges on its own, the district attorney must determine whether the case merits being taken to trial. Pfingst, after reviewing 2,000 pages of documents, concluded that Golding is "factually innocent."
The jury had alleged that Golding cut a back-room deal with the San Diego County Hotel-Motel Assn. to win the group's support of Proposition C on the November 1998 ballot. The measure, approved by a 60%-to-40% margin, calls for the city to pay 70% of the $411-million cost of building a ballpark on the eastern edge of downtown.
The jury alleged that a deal was struck in October 1998 for the association to receive a boost from the City Council in its marketing budget in exchange for supporting the proposition.
