MAN PLEADS NO CONTEST IN COUNTY RECORDS SCAM.

Byline: Karen Maeshiro Staff Writer

A former Los Angeles County Planning Department employee accused of collecting about $500,000 to issue illegal certificates for hundreds of acres in Agua Dulce and Malibu pleaded no contest Friday to falsifying public records.

Emmet Taylor, 67, who had worked in the county planning department for 20 years before he came under suspicion in August 2000, faces up to four years in prison when he is sentenced in July.

``It was just too easy for him and he did it. He was a trusted employee. Everyone trusted he was doing his job,'' Deputy District Attorney Leonard Torrealba said.

Taylor, a resident of Fullerton, entered his plea in Los Angeles Superior Court to three counts of falsification of public records after prosecutors agreed to dismiss 94 other counts.

Taylor was charged with illegally issuing certificates by which landowners avoided public hearings, thousands of dollars worth of fees and other requirements to subdivide property. The certificates were issued over a five-year period, officials said.

Taylor ran a private company out of his home and forged grant deeds and issued fraudulent land division certificates that bypassed the normal public review process, prosecutors said.

``He was taking people on the side and making them his private clients and would charge $1,500 per parcel. They called him 'The Expediter,''' Torrealba said.

The cost of investigating and correcting what Taylor did is between $1.5 million to $2 million, Torrealba said.

Taylor's attorney said his client did not want to run the risk of a long prison sentence.

``He's in the twilight of his life and probably has a lot of good years left. Had he gone to trial and had he been convicted, it's very possible that he would spend the rest of his life in prison. That's not a prospect that was acceptable,'' said Taylor's attorney Robert Schwartz.

Taylor's activities were discovered in August 2000 when one of his clients sent to the county instead of Taylor the payments of $1,500 in so-called ``consulting fees,'' McCarthy said.

Taylor was fired in November 2000 and arrested two years later after an investigation by county officials, who reviewed more than 1,000 so-called certificates of compliance dating back to the early 1990s.

Officials identified 347 certificates that were issued illegally between 1995 and 2000, Torrealba said.

Prosecutors alleged that Taylor created forged grant deeds and dated them prior to 1972, when state lawmakers enacted the California Subdivision Map Act, which set requirements for subdividing acreage into smaller parcels.

Then, they say, he issued the certificates that said a lot had been subdivided before 1972 and that it met all the laws in effect at the time.

``He created these false grant deeds that were dated prior to 1972 and put false notary stamps and forged notary signatures on them and put them into the application packet and went through this legal shortcut,'' Torrealba said.

Supervising regional planner Paul McCarthy said many of the illegal subdivisions were revoked, to the dismay of the property owners.

``There was a lot of unhappy campers out there,'' McCarthy said.

A number of property owners started over and completed processing new parcel and tract maps. Others decided not to go ahead with subdividing their land because they found buyers who wanted the whole parcel.

For the ``innocent buyers'' who purchased property after the illegal subdivision was done, the county added conditions to their projects, such as road dedications, McCarthy said.

Karen Maeshiro, [phone]

karen.maeshiro(at)dailynews.com