Council Removes Culver City Attorney From Job

Culver City Atty. Eleanor Egan was fired this week, a little more than a year after her hiring, by a City Council that was dissatisfied with her work.

“It just wasn’t a good fit, a good mix, with the City Council,” said Dale Jones, the city’s chief administrative officer. Egan was terminated as of Monday, after she refused to resign.

The decision to fire Egan was a cumulative one, Councilman James D. Boulgarides said. He and his fellow council members “just got the feeling we’d lose confidence in what was happening in the city attorney’s office, and you just can’t operate that way,” he said.

Egan said she is accepting the council’s decision. “The city attorney serves at the pleasure of the City Council. . . . There’s no criterion, except what they want,” she said in an interview.

She said, however, that her removal from the $101,892-a-year post was a surprise and that she had not heard any complaints about her services before.

Boulgarides said that in January, he asked the rest of the council about conducting a one-year evaluation of Egan. Council members then raised various complaints, including that Egan’s office was not responsive enough to the public, Boulgarides said, although he did not cite any examples.

Boulgarides said Egan perhaps did not have the “breadth of experience to adequately prepare” for being city attorney. Issues and controversies “move fast sometimes. We expect a pretty quick response from our staff.”

“We concluded we just didn’t have a good match between what we expected and what Eleanor was able to deliver,” he said.

“I have no idea what they might have meant,” Egan said of these criticisms. She believed that she did not have any particular difficulties dealing with council members, “no more than dealing with anybody else.”

One specific fault found by the council involved Egan’s handling of a legal dispute with the owner of the now-defunct Westside Sports Club, who sought city permission to tear down the private gym and tennis facility and build condominiums on the site.

As a condition of approval, the city sought $280,000 in replacement fees to compensate for the loss of the club’s four tennis courts, even though they were not public courts. The club owner sued the city and won, and a Superior Court judge ordered the city to pay the owner’s legal fees, saying it had tried to assess a discriminatory and unreasonable fee on the club owner. The city has appealed the verdict.

The judge also stated that the city attorney had acted in bad faith and that the city’s tactics were frivolous.

“I didn’t. They weren’t,” Egan said this week in response. “We had a real bad result in trial, it’s on appeal, and I think the city will be vindicated.”

Egan had been an assistant city attorney in Costa Mesa since 1982, where she specialized in environmental affairs, land use, contract administration and tort claims.

She was hired by Culver City to succeed Joe Pannone, who this week was back in his old office, appointed by council as interim city attorney. Pannone quit in November, 1989, to join a private law firm but continued to provide legal assistance to the city on a contract basis for projects such as Marina Place, Playa Vista and the city’s environmental regulations.

Despite the firing, Boulgarides praised Egan for being “a most pleasant person and a fine individual.”

Egan, who said she has not decided what to do next, said she is not bitter.

“It’s all part of the game,” she said. “I learned a lot during this year.”

Community correspondent Karen Denne contributed to this story.