The Los Angeles City Council continues its work of wasting money at the same time looks for more ways to collect more money from the individuals and residents. Remember it just finished one phase where their work triples and quadruples parking meter rates, installs credit card payment stands for parking and has raised all city tickets by another $5.00, as well as boosting trash collection fees from $11 a month to $36 last September. (All this happens during City Council meetings that often slip by quietly and quickly. Once in a while, it all hits the fan and the Council Members are quick to find reasons not to take the blame or to make it look like it is doing you some real good.)
This time is was City Controller Laura Chick bringing out information like a "Ripley's Believe It or Not" feature. She's released information from an audit that shows city cars have been assigned to employees of the city, some to emergency response personnel and others simply assigned to our wonderful politicians. Did you know that EACH of the 15 Council Members has 8 City cars provided to them, with gas, maintenance and insurance also covered?
The January 22nd story can be found- [last updated today] in the NBC Los Angeles News website report, Free Ride Ending For LA Employees With Auto Perks, http://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/Free-Ride-Could-Be-Over-For-LA-Employees-With-Auto-Perks.html The LAPD's included in the report, along with the civilian employess.
The L.A. Times' story, "Controller critical of L.A. workers driving city cars," http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2009/01/auditor-critica.html shows examples and blog comments of readers.The Los Angeles Police Department has 4,692 vehicles, 786 of which are home-garaged. The audit questioned whether the more than 200 LAPD employees who live outside Los Angeles County and have take-home cars could respond to an emergency in a timely manner, and whether the department could justify providing them with vehicles.
"I really want to know the rationale for saying that our public safety officers need take-home city cars to be able to respond quickly in case of an emergency and they live 100 miles away. There's something wrong with this picture," Chick said.
As a result of the audit, the LAPD has decided to eliminate take-home vehicles for 120 employees
The City, like the State and Federal government, has its budget problems. The City however has no military personnel to support and the schools are not under their jurisdiction, with a separate budget under the LAUSD. A lot of what's collected as taxes is just turned around and shipped out as payments for programs of often questionable merit and unproven effectiveness, and a lot goes out to pay for services and construction costs. Some people call it "pay to play." Part of the benefit of being "in good" with the decision makers in City Hall, from the Mayor with his 90-plus aides, to the 15 City Council Members, with their 20 staff aides apiece, is that when you have a bid or request for funding a program or supplying a service you might get more attention- like approval of your request- and on that point, we see how tax money flows in the direction of some and not to others.
LAURA CHICK is on the job now but formerly was a supporter of Antonio Villaraigosa, also known as the Mayor, the "11% Mayor," The Absentee Mayor, the Photo Ops Mayor, Tony V., or simply, Mayor Tony. That closeness has appeared to have been over for a long time with a lot of the discoveries by the Controller's Office showing a poorly managed city with no one watching the store- or as I sometimes consider it, the inmates running the asylum- and running it very expensively at that, running it right into the ground if you look more closely, behind all the rhetoric.
You can see that WENDY GRUEL, CM from the CD-2 in the San Fernando Valley is trying to get some good campaign mileage out of this situation. She's been an Antonio supporter from way back and as CM, she's not been part of the "solution", but clearly, part of the problem.
Running against GRUEL as a better person for the job is Nick Patsaouras, formerly President of the DWP commission, but having left that post after finding he was still unable and not authorized to control a lot of what is DWP is adding to the cost of everything when you live inside the Los Angeles city limits. The L.A. Daily News story, "City officials to review use of take-home vehicles," has more response of officials to Chick's audit, including an order from Tony to departments to "suspend the issuance of new take-home vehicles or purchase of new equipment" and to end the use of city gas credit cards at commercial gas stations. Good move, Mr. Mayor. It's the least he could do.
CM WENDY GRUEL has been presenting a more enlightened image to the public since embarking on her campaign for City Controller. Her hard glares and lapses of patience have been toned down remarkably so and you can see that staying in a public office is her aim. The benefit of that will be going only to Wendy, not to us, the residents of the city. She's been too much the "yes man" (or "yes woman") when it comes to doing what Mayor Tony has asked for without any serious evaluation to see it his requests have merit.
Most of City government operates that way- "I do you a favor, and then, you do me one in exchange," and on and on like that. Unfortunately, these favors often come at a hefty price just because expenses run that way, or because they waste money by sloppy spending, getting into bad contracts that leave the city a loser on the terms, or just plain effing up the whole deal by not having SOMEONE keep track of things. The city lost thousands of dollars in parking fines by not collecting them from the agency it hired to do collections; the city lost money a few years back when they discovered that rent had not been charged to some tenants on Olvera Street and that there were many tenants without any written rental agreements.
Did you know that our present City Attorney ROCKY DELGADILLO was being audited, well, his office was, that is, for how it was handling workers compensation cases? So did he cooperate to show us how well things are? Not quite. ROCKY filed a lawsuit against City Controller LAURA CHICK to stop her from conducting the audit of his department- all leaving Ms. CHICK TO GO to the city council almost two months ago for some funding to handle the suit, but they put that off and left her on her own for legal costs EVEN THOUGH IT'S PART OF her JOB. Council President Garcetti tried to pass the buck saying that the litigation was done with any prior consulting from the City Attorney's office.
What Chick did get was a token showing of sympathy from guess who? WENDY GRUEL, the one who wants to be elected on March 3, 2009 to Ms. Chick's office. Term limits require Chick to leave the post. I suppose WENDY wanted to show some knowledge of the way things go in the Controller's office, or maybe she did not want to have ROCKY jack her around if she were to get elected and have to meet up with his legal antics while trying to get information from the City Attorney's Office.
The Council has approved payments of legal fees for other city employees very routinely, but you know they are not happy with Chick for finding out things that embarrass them and for revealing what is REALLY going on that SHOULD NOT be happening.
WENDY says she can be independent from any influence by the Mayor’s office, and that’s what ROCKY said about the billboard companies. So now the settlement MADE BY ROCKY with the billboard companies turns out to be a legal disaster, with the uneven exceptions undermining the whole thing. That allowed the court to find the settlement flawed as authority regulating billboards the way the city wanted to.
ROCKY has a history of problems, shown vividly by an L.A. Weekly story on June 28, 2007, "Rocky Delgadillo's Flameout," http://www.laweekly.com/2007-06-28/news/rocky-delgadillo-s-flameout/ that includes the problems created by false reports of an accident while his wife was driving a city car. And to remind you again that he is the city's top attorney, with the assigned responsibility for enforcing the law.
We don’t need more waste and we don't need those failng to do their job to remain.
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