The City Council was absolutely, positively in favor of letting the LA voters decide whether or not the City Controller should be able to audit programs run by LA’s elected city officials. I mean who better to decide on such matters then the citizenry?
But then, in a blinding flash of revelation the Council realized that if the voters decided YES on this auditing thingy, then the City Controller could audit…..ULP….them.
Uh, oh.
On second thought, said the Council on Friday, we don’t really need to trouble the voters with any silly old audit issues.
They’ve had a rough year, poor dears, having to elect a President and all. Better to let them rest a bit.
Here’s what today’s LA Times editorial said about this infuriating and absurd turn of events.
The City Council doesn’t lack for a sense of humor. Take last Friday, for example, when it scuttled an attempt to let voters clarify whether the city controller has the power to audit programs run by other elected officials.
To get the joke, you’ll need some background. Once upon a time, an appointed Los Angeles official known as the city administrative officer conducted performance audits of city programs. That is, the CAO looked into various city operations and reported back to the mayor and the City Council on whether things could be run better. But the CAO had a low public profile and his reports were often ignored, so there was a push to get someone else to do those audits. Two charter reform commissions agreed that the elected city controller, who already did financial audits, should also audit the performance of city programs. Voters approved the change when they adopted the new City Charter in 1999.
To the rescue rode the City Council, which suggested letting the voters settle the question next March….
[SNIP]OK, here comes the funny part. When council members discovered that they too might come under controller scrutiny, they suddenly found the issue too important to put to the voters.
Read the rest…..and weep.
I don’t think that I’m wrong on this but I’m limited on time to be sure, so check to see if all city budgets are audited by outside auditors. I think that they are. Here’s the Controller’s link to guide you to that, and the titles appear right. http://www.lacity.org/ctr/financial_reports.htm I know that I’m not the first to say this, but L.A. has a chick as controller.
That’s not the issue, Celeste. The Councilmembers overwhelmingly expressed explicit support for audits, especially financial ones, but are concerned that Laura Chick has used audits for her own political grandstanding, passive- aggressive backstabbing and PR purposes for her future elections. The Council wanted to set some parameters to distinguish between financial audits (her sole job as Controller) vs. politically-motivated alleged “performance audits” which is what the election process is there for.
“Her” expensive audits are usually just done by outsiders in the same way she (justifiably) blasts Rocky for, and often rehash the work of others. AFTER they’ve done enough work on identifying a problem and bringing media attention to it, that she can say to herself: “Wow, that’s a good issue, I’ll ‘discover’ it and hold a huge press conference about it!” She has had a free ride way too long in not having any oversight, and she refused to discuss anything, just made demands that it would be her way or the highway. So they gave her the highway, refusing to cave to her threats.
This isn’t just between unpopular Rocky and her, but Cardenas (with his gang programs, over which they butted heads in an unseemly way) –but also Alarcon, conservative and mild-mannered Greig Smith, and virtually everyone else. As was pointed out, next year many of these people will be gone, and with new players, the political “payola” may get even worse: the idea was to keep politics out of the job.
Alarcon suggested ALL of them being subject equally to an outside auditor where politics might be an issue, but she refused to have any oversight herself. Her suggestion that she’d suspect audits for 6 months before running for an election herself wasn’t good enough — that would suspect ALL audits of anyone in the city for half a year. We need continuous, open, apolitcal oversight.
Her childish insistence on costing the taxpayers millions in suing the City to try to get her way is the real problem — especially since she’s so blatantly ambitious. She’s likely planning to run for Wendy Greuel’s seat on CD2 if Wendy wins the Controller spot (for which Chick is termed out), but if she wins, what do you wanna bet, she’ll be first in line to put some parameters to Wendy’s job as Controller?
Chick benefits from being the darling of the feminist set of a certain age, and has cultivated that, with the women’s forums she holds at City Hall, gathering women from every walk of life. Laurel Erickson’s virtual reverence of Chick on a recent Newsmaker program was painfully obvious, and she sucked up every word of Chick’s (never questioned why, if she’s really an aware auditer, she was allegedly totally unaware of the problems with DNA rape kits and general testing problems, although they’d been reported on in the media many times, and her colleagues on Council had held conferences and given many interviews about it — until she “discovered” these problems and feigned outrage over them?). She is also given a virtual coronation as Saint Laura by the conservatives who hate everything about City Hall, and her being a small, pugnacious female going against a couple of “macho” Latinos works to her advantage. Even the Times got bamboozled by her this time.
But now that she’s forcing an analysis of her role as well, I hope there is REAL transparency (buzzword of the day) which includes her.
Meant, “suspend” all audits of anyone for half a year, not “suspect.” (Freudian slip, since mutual suspicion is the backstory here.)
Good points, WBC. It’s likely not quite as black and white as I’ve portrayed it.