When the new City Attorney, City Controller and CD-5 Council member take office on July 1, you would expect the outgoing officials to have cleaned out desks and to take the appointees who are going out with them. Not so for the case of Rocky Delgadillo, outgoing City Attorney and locally noted as a Franklin High alum. The L.A. Times reports today, "Trutanich to inherit top Delgadillo aides;
With budget cuts looming, many who worked for the outgoing city attorney have been given job protection. Several have relatively high salaries." By Rich Connell. June 8, 2009. http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-city-attorney-jobs8-2009jun08,0,4769343.story
Usually, the incoming person is able to replace the old appointees the with new selections, but Delgadillo made some changes that prevent several of them from being removed. So Rocky has left some friends with job security and the new City Attorney, Carmen "Nuch" Trutanich, has to make some adjustments. The salary for each person is between $100,000.00 and $200,000.00, The Times has the details and with the City budget as tight as it is, you wonder why Rocky would have tied the hands of the incoming City Attorney as he did.
Well, Rocky has a history of bad decisions and outcomes and you can check on that yourself; he's already cost the City a lot in use of outside counsel when there's about 600 attorneys in that office. You'd think he'd have arranged for some of them to work on those assignments to save the hugely expensive legal bills of outside counsel. That's one item of regular and large billing during Delgadillo's term of office that did not help the city treasury or the public.
Trutanich has announced that he WILL be working on having more work handled by the City Attorney's staff and cut down on the cases sent out to private firms. We may be headed in the right direction now and it's about time.
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