San Diego Government Officials

In the final act of a legal drama that has dominated local politics for months, San Diego Councilwoman Valerie Stallings resigned Monday after pleading guilty to receiving unreported gifts from Padres majority owner John Moores. The most expensive of the gifts, worth about $2,300, were airplane tickets so that Stallings' daughter and sister in Kansas could come to San Diego to be with Stallings during a mastectomy and chemotherapy in 1996.

A judge Monday declined to add to former City Councilwoman Valerie Stallings' punishment for taking unreported gifts from Padres owner John Moores. The judge rendered the decision after receiving pleas on Stallings' behalf from a congressman, a former state senator, a prominent scientist and two Catholic priests.

Amid calls for his resignation, the treasurer-tax collector of San Diego County apologized Wednesday for sending a series of e-mails to an employee that led to a sexual harassment claim against him that was settled for $100,000. But Bart Hartman refused to resign his elected post. "I don't believe one mistake is too much to forgive," Hartman said in a written statement.

Someday, Susan Golding may be remembered as the mayor who initiated the city's biggest downtown redevelopment project, created nationally acclaimed child-care and environmental protection programs, and boosted the local economy by making the city more business-friendly. Someday. But not today.

Former state Assemblyman Tom Connolly, who served a single term from eastern San Diego County, was sentenced Thursday to two years in state prison for having sex with a 14-year-old girl. Connolly, 51, a lawyer and Vietnam veteran, said he disagrees with a probation officer's evaluation that he is not remorseful. He vowed to rebuild his life despite being a sex offender.

As night falls on Sand Hill Road, Susan Golding faces an audience of venture capitalists, another seeker come to Silicon Valley's promised land. Fading sunlight dapples the rolling countryside as Golding makes her pitch: the opportunity, the market niche, the payoff. Countless supplicants and visionaries have made this pilgrimage to woo and win the gung-ho entrepreneurs who inhabit the woodsy office parks lining Sand Hill Road.

Mayor Susan Golding and other city officials withheld key information from voters and also used improper influence to get a taxpayers' group to endorse their drive for a downtown ballpark, the San Diego County Grand Jury charged Friday. The grand jury issued the blistering report, its third criticizing portions of the ballpark project, as part of its oversight role for local government. There were no criminal indictments.

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.

With a withering blast at the county grand jury, the presiding judge of San Diego dismissed civil misconduct charges Thursday filed by the jury against Mayor Susan Golding. Judge Wayne Peterson agreed with Dist. Atty. Paul Pfingst that the jury had done a sloppy job of gathering evidence and that Golding was "factually innocent" of the two charges filed. "The grand jury ignored the Constitution, ignored the facts and ignored common sense," Peterson said.