Westminster City Councilwoman Amy Phan West was granted a misdemeanor diversion program on Monday after being accused of using her political influence to prevent her husband’s car from being towed by the city.
Phan West was charged in January with a misdemeanor count of offering a bribe to a public officer. As part of the diversion program, Phan West must perform 20 hours of community service with a nonprofit organization and take a two-hour ethics class, according to court records.
If she fulfills the requirements without incident by Aug. 11, 2026, she can seek to have the misdemeanor dismissed. She was also ordered to pay $500 to the Victim Witness Emergency Fund and a $100 diversion fee.
A progress hearing was scheduled for Oct. 27.
The councilwoman was operating a car rental business through the Turo application around Dorothy Street and Melanie Lane in the city, which drew about 20 calls for service regarding “dirty, unregistered or abandoned vehicles” in the area in 2023, according to the Orange County District Attorney’s Office.
When two parking control officers ordered a tow of a Jeep registered to the councilwoman’s husband on April 21, 2023, she asked them not to tow the vehicle and offered to move it herself.
Prosecutors said she also told them she “loves” the police department, was “close friends” with the police chief and was advocating for pay raises for the department as its union was negotiating a new contract.
Phan West also showed the parking officers a police department keychain, prosecutors alleged. The parking officers canceled the tow, prosecutors said.
Her attorney, Randy Collins, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Westminster resident Terry Rains led a group of more than 100 others in the city objecting to the diversion program in a letter to the court.
Rains argued that allowing Phan West to participate in a diversion program “sets a dangerous precedent — that political power trumps the rule of law.”
The letter said diversion programs were aimed at drug possession or petty theft offenses, “not for crimes that threaten the core functioning of government or undermine the rule of law.”
The group requested a plea deal that would document the misdemeanor conviction while allowing her to avoid jail.
“A diversion program, followed by total dismissal of this case, would be a grave miscarriage of justice and an insult to the residents of Westminster,” Rains wrote. “Such an outcome would suggest that public office grants immunity from the consequences of illegal actions, thereby eroding the fundamental principle of the rule of law.”