ORANGE COUNTY PERSPECTIVE : Mayor of Brea Should Go Now

Brea has been troubled by controversy for months. It’s fair to say the city needs a fresh start.

Two members of its City Council have been targets of outside investigations, and redevelopment plans for downtown effectively went into a deep freeze after a judge ruled against the city’s Redevelopment Agency in a lawsuit brought by a coalition of businesses.

Now one of those council members, Mayor Ronald E. Isles, has reached a sticking point with prosecutors over the details of a plea-bargaining agreement. He pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges of conflict of interest and failing to fully report his financial holdings. He says he may now go to trial and let the agreement unravel over the confusion about the actual date he will leave office.

But his departure date should not loom so large in the scheme of things of a city racked by turmoil. He must leave office anyway on Dec. 1 when his term expires. Whether to go in October or December is not a sufficient bone of contention to keep the city from getting on track.

Isles in fact stated his intention to withdraw from the scene last summer when, without referring to his legal troubles, he announced he wouldn’t seek reelection. Included in the charges is that he continued a business relationship with a former development partner after being elected to the City Council in 1988 and that he subsequently voted to extend a city contract granting his old partner some development rights.

What could Isles possibly accomplish by staying on a few more weeks? It may, in fact, be counterproductive for him to stay. There is little to gain in prolonging his tenure and there is much to gain by his leaving.

It should be noted that it is possible to see how Isles might have been tempted to reach for straws. The plea-bargaining agreement entered last Friday in Fullerton Municipal Court indicated that everybody understood there was no requirement that Isles step down immediately. After the agreement was entered, Orange County Deputy Dist. Atty. James J. Mulgrew discovered a section of the state government code that seemed to require a city official to resign immediately after he pleaded guilty to offenses involving his municipal duties.

But if the agreement was clumsy and insufficiently airtight, the case for Isles’ early departure remains strong. Whatever he thinks about his own innocence--he maintains that his guilty plea constituted only an acknowledgment of carelessness, not any criminality--he can help matters greatly in his city by going sooner rather than later.