Slide Inquiry Finds No Sign That County Violated Law : La Conchita: But officials often squabbled with sheriff’s office over who would pay for monitoring of the unstable hillside.

Although a district attorney’s investigation found allegations of foot-dragging, internal bickering and dereliction of duty in Ventura County’s handling of March’s devastating La Conchita mudslide, no evidence was uncovered that county officials broke any laws, investigators said Tuesday.

Chief Deputy Dist. Atty. Jeff Bennett, who oversaw the two-month probe, declined to say more about the investigation, which is now closed.

But investigative records obtained by The Times show that the Public Works Department often squabbled with sheriff’s officials over who would pay for geologists to monitor the increasingly unstable hillside eight miles northwest of Ventura.

And the records indicate that a sheriff’s deputy and a county geologist believed that Supervisor Maggie Kildee and her staff members were less than enthusiastic about handling the landslide threat and had even downplayed it, an accusation that Kildee denied.

Kildee said that before the March 4 landslide, she had wished fervently that a slide was not going to occur--an attitude some may have taken for lack of enthusiasm in dealing with the issue.

“But I think the office has tried to be as helpful as possible in any way we can,” she said.

There was little her office could do, she said, because the looming landslide was a private property issue between La Conchita homeowners and the hillside’s owner, neighboring La Conchita Ranch, which operates citrus and avocado groves atop the hillside.

In the end, Kildee said, none of this affected public safety. And no one, she said, could have stopped 600,000 tons of mud from destroying or damaging 14 residences in the seaside village. No one was injured, but the slide badly devalued real estate on the remaining properties.

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“There was nothing I am aware of that could have prevented the landslide,” she said. “There wasn’t any way we could have built a barricade or built a wall to protect the homes.” The county had been warning La Conchita homeowners of the danger for six months, but the cost of stabilizing the crumbling hillside was prohibitively expensive--an estimated $30 million to $50 million.

The bulk of the district attorney’s investigation focused on an ongoing dispute over the Public Works Department’s action to pull geologists off the job less than two weeks before the slide occurred, records show.

There is some dispute over the reason the geologists left La Conchita unwatched before the landslide. But the investigative records show their absence touched off an interdepartmental spat centered around money.

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The county Public Works Department had contracted with RJR Engineering Group of Camarillo in January to monitor the hillside. Jim Fisher, who had resigned in December as the county’s official geologist, was now working for RJR and the county relied on him on occasion for updates on the hillside’s decay.

The county sheriff’s and fire departments also began to rely heavily on Fisher’s expertise to develop an emergency response plan.

But in February, public works officials began to balk at how often the sheriff was using Fisher without paying separately for his service.

Fisher and Sheriff’s Senior Deputy Darryl Dunn told investigators that John Crowley, public works deputy director, did not want the geologist involved in the situation involving La Conchita, records show.

But Crowley later told Stephen Hendrick, district attorney’s investigator, that his office never forbade Fisher to visit La Conchita--merely that the geologist was required to get department approval for each visit.

Fisher and Dunn also alleged that public works officials ordered RJR not to comply with the sheriff’s request to create a “worst-case scenario” report on La Conchita.

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In the end, the Sheriff’s Department spent its own money to keep RJR on the job to produce the report and help deputies plan for disaster.

“If this information was so terribly important to the sheriff, the sheriff could have given us a work authorization,” Arthur Goulet, public works director, said Tuesday. “Then we could have done anything he wanted, so long as he was willing to pay for it.”

“There is a process in place that allows them to sort it out ahead of time. Otherwise it would be chaos around here. We’d have all sorts of people spending all kinds of money without the ability to pay for it,” Goulet said. “That’s not the way you do business privately, and that’s not the way you should do the public’s business.”

Sheriff’s officials, however, said the quarrel amounted to a potentially deadly clash of philosophies.

“We’re very used to the mutual aid process. Where it’s a public safety issue, we help each other,” said Lt. Haskell Chandler, who oversaw emergency preparations for La Conchita.

The Public Works Department should have loaned the geologist to deputies without worrying about money, he said.

“It was a matter of life-safety issues, and in that regard, how can you put a price on a life?” Chandler asked.

“Our biggest concern was painting the worst-case scenario” for planning purposes, Chandler said. “This occurred in the daytime . . . a worst-case scenario would have been a larger slide in the middle in the night. At that point, we would have been doing body recoveries.”