THE VIEW FROM HERE - With all the talk about doing away with fraud and waste, you would think that the candidates for Mayor and Controller might provide a few particulars. I mean, if you know where the waste is, then perhaps you ought to mention a few specifics. Not only that, but the head of the department where the waste occurs is obviously someone you should want to mention in your campaigning and, having won the election, meet with for a frank chat.
For some reason, the current crop of candidates haven't been naming names or reciting changes they would make. Let's offer them a little help.
Down here in the harbor area, we've been witness to management in the Recreation and Parks Department that is so inadequate, I wouldn't even call it bad management. I just view it as non-management.
Over the past few years, people have brought to my attention a collection of complaints about the way this department operates. They include abuse of workers, rudeness to employees, wasted resources including gasoline and vehicle miles, abandonment of a public facility by managerial staff during the time that the public was present, and a repetitive pattern of early departure from work by staff members.
A little more than a year ago, I ran into the General Manager of Rec & Parks at a press conference held in San Pedro. I introduced myself and mentioned that there were some management problems down in our area, and I asked him who was in charge of such administrative affairs for our area. The GM, Jon Kirk Mukri, politely said that he was the one, and he gave me his business card.
About six months later, I attempted to follow up on the management issue. I called the Recreation and Parks office, explained my concerns, and asked to schedule a meeting with Mr. Mukri. The person I spoke with said that someone would get back to me. Nobody did.
I called again, and asked who was in charge of the harbor area and directly answerable to Mr. Mukri. I was told that it was a Mr. Reagan. I asked to speak to Reagan, and again I was told that they would pass the request along, and that Reagan would call me.
He never did.
I made additional calls, providing details about the alleged mismanagement. I repeatedly asked to speak to Mukri. Again and again, I was told that Mukri would contact me.
Did he? To repeat the old joke, Not So Much. As in never.
There is an old principle in journalism that if you are going to make an allegation against someone, you owe that person a telephone call so that he or she can respond. That's why newspaper stories include that now-monotonous line that phone calls to the person in question were not returned. You can add this account to that old line.
This story is also a little closer to home, because it involves a direct promise that Jon Kirk Mukri made to me. As in a few previous recitations of mine published in CityWatch, this story could be appended with another parenthetical remark about full disclosure. Suffice it to say that my information comes from numerous people I have known closely for years, and I consider the information to be credible.
Let's consider just one example among many that Los Angeles residents have a right to be concerned about. You may recall that a few years ago, the city was, as usual, in financial difficulty.
One approach that the administration took was to offer incentives for early retirement to city employees. The ERIP program, as it was called, has been the subject of criticism in CityWatch articles, but it was the official policy of the city at the time, and upper management in the city government encouraged employees to take advantage of the program. In fact, upper management and elected officials continue to brag that the city has reduced its work force, and give ERIP some of the credit for the decrease.
A longtime city employee I know personally decided to take advantage of the ERIP program -- it was too good a deal to pass up. So he turned in his papers, and then informed his supervisor that he had done so. City policy would have suggested that the supervisor give a hearty thank you for helping fulfill the city's goal and congratulations on a splendid career.
Once again, not so much. We have the word of the employee and of another witness that the departing employee was immediately given the cold shoulder by the supervisor. He had, after all, thrown a bit of a monkey wrench into the facility's schedule, and apparently the supervisor didn't take it very well. When the departing employee decided to throw a retirement party for himself in a local restaurant, the supervisor made it difficult for his fellow employees to attend. Taken as a whole, the supervisor's behavior, in my opinion, seemed spiteful.
I'm not aware that the city government encourages shunning as an administrative response to an employee who follows official policy. That's another question I would have liked to ask Mr. Mukri. But the effect on employee morale couldn't have been more obvious when I listened to employees repeating this story. That's mismanagement we are looking at, and a whole chain of managers from the most local to the GM himself are culpable.
This is just one of several stories I've heard about departing employees being treated with lack of courtesy, sometimes to an extent that could be considered abusive. Whether this is the result of departmental policy or just personality quirks on the part of management, it reflects a lack of interest, or perhaps a lack of knowledge, on the part of higher levels of management.
In other words, somebody at the citywide level should have noticed, and noticing, should have done something. When I tried to communicate this to Jon Kirk Mukri, I was not given the chance. Had I been given the chance, I would also have asked about allegations of misuse of city owned vehicles as well as mismanagement of staff time.
There are a lot of other questions that Rec and Parks ought to answer about the way they do business, about the way they treat their employees, and about the way they manage -- or in this case, fail to manage -- the functions of the department. They don't seem to be interested in answering any of them. And the General Manager of the department has had more than adequate opportunity to return a phone call. The new mayor ought to ask those questions and, failing to get answers, find someone to run the department who can do it right.
There may be other departments that desperately need a little shakeup in the way they are administered. Feel free to email CityWatch with suggestions, preferably accompanied by demonstrable facts.
Another Questionable Appointment -- One that Involves Neighborhood Council Participants
State law requires that meetings of legislative bodies be held in public, and that the public be informed in advance through the posting of a written notice and agenda. The Ralph M. Brown Act added this requirement to California law. We typically refer to meetings that require posted notification as being Brown acted, our slang term for this rule.
When the neighborhood councils first came into being in the years beginning 2001-2004, the Board of Neighborhood Commissioners (BONC) usually required that the newly formed councils post not just one, but at least five notices in different parts of their districts to inform the residents of monthly governing board meetings. This requirement went beyond state law, but the neighborhood councils were a new invention (at least in Los Angeles), and the idea was to reach out to the broader public.
At that time, most newly forming councils imagined holding a monthly meeting, but did not foresee holding numerous committee meetings. Over the course of the years, we have extended our interests. Now we have multiple committees which hold their own meetings and then report to the council as a whole.
Any one neighborhood council may now have committees on topics as broad as land use, public safety, education, communications, and the environment. In any one month, at least three of these (or other) committees are likely to hold a meeting. That means that for an average neighborhood council in the city of Los Angeles, there will typically be at least 3 or 4 meetings of committees followed by a meeting of the board as a whole. Some councils will hold more.
In the early days, most neighborhood council committees did not post their agendas in multiple places. After all, this was not a requirement of state law or of city policy. We simply posted our one paper notification as required by state law, and followed it up by sending out emails. In other words, we acted as if we were living in the twenty-first century.
But then, just a few years ago, some members of the BONC decided to help us out (and I use the phrase with full sarcastic intent here). At the time, Al Abrams and Linda Lucks were kind of like a political party on the commission, and it is fair to say that their approach was a bit authoritarian.
Perhaps one might word it more kindly, to say that participants at the local level were viewed as something akin to junior high school students, and BONC commissioners were the deans. In any event, they led the BONC to creating a new policy with regard to committee notifications. They ruled that henceforth, all neighborhood council committees would be required to adhere to the same posting rule as exists for governing board meetings -- that is, that we would be required to do 5 separate postings for each and every committee meeting. That's a lot of postings.
They may have rationalized the new policy as being a clarification of an existing ambiguity, but in practice it was a substantial imposition on neighborhood council participants.
Let's consider some of the effects of this policy. I'll give warning that the next few paragraphs involve a little junior high level math, but even BONC members should be able to follow:
Let's figure that each of the neighborhood councils holds, on average, about 3 committee meetings each month. That comes to 95 councils times 3 meetings, or 285 committee meetings citywide. Notice that some councils have more than 3 committee meetings, but I'm doing a fairly conservative calculation. In reality, the total number of committee meetings is probably larger.
What does this mean in practice?
I recently did the 5 required postings for a committee that I chair. I'm going to speculate that most people who have to do these postings will drive (a fair assumption, I think), and since the posting locations are designed to cover a broad range of locations, the total drive will be on the order of 10 miles total. That means that in any one month, neighborhood council participants will engage in 2850 miles of additional driving.
Considered over the course of a year, those BONC regulations add a little over 34,000 miles of additional automobile travel on our streets each year.
Let's give the BONC the benefit of the doubt, and imagine that we are all getting 25 miles per gallon (an extremely generous estimate for city driving), which means that we are burning a little over 1350 gallons of gasoline just to do those added postings. At current prices, that's more than five thousand dollars coming out of our pockets. But cost isn't the only issue.
To see why, let's do one more calculation for the benefit of all of our environmental committees: Every gallon of gasoline we burn (Look this up in Wikipedia if you doubt it) puts a little over 19 pounds of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The official calculations run between 19.3 and 19.6 pounds per gallon (for technical reasons we don't have to get into), but 19 or 20 is a reasonable estimate.
This means that the BONC policy adds a minimum of 25,000 pounds of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year. And the responsibility for this falls squarely on the shoulders of BONC commissioner Linda Lucks.
That's because there are 3 votes on the BONC to reverse the posting policy, but it requires 4 votes, and Lucks has been the NO vote.
There are other reasons for wanting to remove the 5-postings rule. For one, the argument that these postings do any good at all, is weak at best. Some neighborhood councils may consider multiple postings to be a useful way of informing the public about their meetings. But the argument I am making is not that such postings should be prohibited, just that the rule not be imposed on all of the rest of us.
In my home neighborhood council, our board and our stakeholders agree strongly that the posting policy serves little or no useful purpose, and that we would be better served by other forms of outreach. My experience in talking to people from all around the city is that many neighborhood council participants agree.
After all, neighborhood councils are volunteer organizations. We serve without pay and with little public acclaim. What's left is a sense of accomplishment in serving the public good and occasionally winning the battle to get a new park built. Those required postings are adding something in excess of 3000 man and woman hours per year to our workload, and they are hours that are largely unproductive.
The BONC policy that was inflicted upon us should be removed. It would be removed if there only were one more vote on the BONC to do so. The poor judgment that has gone into fighting against this useful reform should also be removed from the BONC.
(Bob Gelfand is a founder of the city's second neighborhood council and writes on politics and culture for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 11 Issue 27
Pub: Apr 2, 2013