San Diego County’s lease for a district office used by Supervisor Joel Anderson is set to steer hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxpayer money to the owners of the building over the term of the agreement.
Those owners, records show, are a powerful East County family who have been notable donors to Anderson’s political campaigns.
Three years ago, Anderson’s staff suggested the modest El Cajon office building as a suitable space for his office. Since then, the county has rented it from a company owned by the Hamann family, known in East County for their real estate holdings, construction projects and philanthropic work.
The office gives Anderson an outpost closer to the constituents of his sprawling district, which stretches from San Diego north to Julian and south to Jacumba.
But the arrangement could create an appearance of a conflict of interest, as Anderson’s office has steered public dollars to a business owned by a family who have been his political benefactors.
The arrangement also raises questions about the influence donors have over the public officials to whose campaigns they donate money, ethics and good-government experts said.
In a statement, Anderson called The San Diego Union-Tribune’s questions about the lease “outrageous.”
“Did Carl DeMaio put you up to this?” he said, referring to the local Assembly member and fellow Republican.
Hamann Companies, which owns the building, did not respond to a request for comment.
Under the five-year lease, the county agreed to pay the Hamanns’ business $3,559 in monthly rent for the lease’s first year, rising each year by around 3.5%.
Anderson’s staff identified the property as a site for a district office, and the lease was approved administratively because it costs less than $10,000 a month and lasts no more than five years, said county spokesperson Sarah Sweeney.
Anderson did not disclose his relationship with the Hamann family to the county when the lease was being negotiated, and such disclosure is not required under county leasing rules, Sweeney said.
She did not answer questions about whether the lease violated any county conflict of interest or ethics rules.
Anderson’s lack of disclosure about his relationship to the Hamanns likely creates the appearance of a conflict of interest, said Davina Hurt, a government ethics expert at Santa Clara University.
“The fact that this is a political donor raises questions as to why this location has been chosen and whose interest it serves,” Hurt said.
“Ethics in government isn’t about perfection,” she added. “It’s about just trying hard to be accountable, transparent and maintaining public trust.”
Anderson’s district office makes him unique among the Board of Supervisors’ four other members, none of whom have a district office in a privately owned building.
Supervisor Jim Desmond has a district office in the county-owned Vista courthouse, and no money is paid for his office’s use of it, said spokesperson Miles Himmel. Other supervisors’ offices are in the county building downtown.
Before Anderson’s district office moved into the Hamanns’ property, it was located in the county-owned El Cajon courthouse. But a sewage problem in the building prompted him to relocate, Anderson said.
“This site has ample parking and space,” Anderson said of his current district office. “Due to COVID, we were limited in our choices on spaces that were accessible to constituents.”
Sweeney added that Anderson’s staff picked the site “given its proximity to public transportation and ability to accommodate its needs for the public and staff.”
Lease costs
Anderson’s district office is located at 475 W. Bradley Ave., a single-story structure situated across from Gillespie Field in El Cajon.
The county signed a five-year lease with Hamann Property Management for the space in late August 2022. Under the terms of the lease, the county does not have to pay for any utilities.
At the beginning of this year, the lease was amended for the county to rent a second office suite in the building for Anderson and his staff to use as well. The current monthly rent for the entire space is $4,991.
Through June of this year, the county had paid about $133,000 in rent for the office space, according to a ledger of the county’s payments. That left another $132,000 in taxpayer funds still to be paid to the Hamanns’ company by the end of the lease in 2027.
A county real estate appraiser determined the county pays market rate for the space, Sweeney said.
According to Costar, a real estate database, comparable office space in El Cajon goes for $2.59 per square foot, while the county pays $1.71 per square foot.
Money for the rent comes out of Anderson’s overall office budget — a $3.6 million lump sum that every county supervisor gets this fiscal year to spend at their discretion on staff, contracts, office supplies, transportation and more.
County budget data shows Anderson has budgeted $565,000 for non-staff costs, and about $60,000 is set to come out of that for the lease over the next year.
Longtime donors
Campaign money from the Hamann family have landed Anderson in ethical scrutiny twice before.
In 2009, when he was in the state Assembly, Anderson was fined $20,000 by the California Fair Political Practices Commission over donations involving the Hamanns.
A San Diego Union-Tribune investigation earlier that year had found that three members of the Hamann family made donations to the Fresno County Republican Central Committee that exceeded limits for individual donors, and that donations in near-identical amounts were made to Anderson by the central committee days later.
At the time, Anderson called it an accidental error.
In 2019, county election officials probed allegations that donations Anderson accepted, including from four members of the Hamann family, may have violated local campaign finance rules and referred the case to the District Attorney’s Office. Charges were never filed, and Anderson’s then-chief of staff called the allegations a “bogus attack” drummed up by his political rivals.
The Hamann family and at least one of their employees have continued to donate to Anderson’s political campaigns since then, giving $40,000 since 2022. That includes $1,000 contributions to his 2024 re-election campaign from four members of the Hamann family.
Thousands more have flowed from the Hamanns to Anderson’s campaign to serve on the Central Committee of the county Republican Party. Candidates for the central committee can raise unlimited sums of money.
Gregg Hamann, president of Hamann Companies, gave $8,000 to Anderson’s central committee campaign in recent years. Jeffery Hamann gave $3,000, and Brendan Thiessen, the director of property and asset management for Hamann Companies, gave $10,000.
Today, a California state law, the Levine Act, prohibits public officials — including supervisors — from accepting donations totaling more than $500 from anyone to whom they’ve steered public business in the last 12 months.
But the law did not take effect for county supervisors until Jan. 1, 2023, months after the lease for the district office was signed.
The FPPC has ruled that the Levine Act does not apply retroactively, commission spokesperson Shery Yang noted. She declined to comment on the lease for Anderson’s district office.
To good-government experts, the arrangement is still cause for concern.
“Perceptually, it doesn’t look good,” said Sean McMorris, the transparency, ethics and accountability manager for California Common Cause, a nonprofit that advocates for government accountability and transparency.
“Whether it’s through a straight bribe — which this is not — or through a campaign contribution that’s meant to curry favor, there’s a very fine line there,” he said. “One is legal and one is not, but the perception is the same.”