Rent Board Attorney Quits After 4 Months

Sally Molloy, the head attorney for Santa Monica’s Rent Control Board, has resigned after barely four months on the job, in the agency’s third major high-level shake-up in less than two years.

Molloy assumed the position of general counsel in mid-March, replacing Joel M. Levy, who took a lower-level job within the agency. In late 1987, the board fired another key staff member, administrator Howell Tumlin.

Molloy, 39, had been on the board’s staff for eight years. She said she was leaving to “pursue other avenues.” She declined to link her resignation to rumors of discontent in the rent control agency’s legal department among attorneys said to be unhappy with some of the board’s recent actions.

Susan Packer Davis, chairwoman of the board, also declined to discuss the matter in detail, saying only that Molloy seemed “uncomfortable” about following some of the board’s directions.

“My feeling is that our vision of the way the legal department needs to work wasn’t quite the same vision she had,” Davis said, adding that Molloy’s replacement would come from outside the agency.

Molloy said Friday that her resignation is effective Aug. 1.