Phones Grow Silent as Industry Council’s Image Takes a Battering

The telephones rang off the hook at the Los Angeles City Private Industry Council (PIC) last summer when radio and TV ads featuring Mayor Tom Bradley and celebrity Ed McMahon urged the business community and the unemployed to participate in the federal Job Training Partnership Act.

The PIC’s $160,000 marketing campaign was finally starting to pay dividends, after being pulled off the air months earlier by radio stations that had been owed $22,445 in advertising fees.

During a heavy promotional push in July and August, 295 employers and 1,397 out-of-work residents responded to the Bradley and McMahon spots, according to PIC figures. The callers were referred to 55 job placement programs, which each year receive a total of $42 million in federal grants to train disadvantaged youths, single parents on welfare and non-English-speaking immigrants for work in a variety of occupations. These include positions such as computer programmers, auto mechanics, cable installers, electricians, carpenters, security guards and cooks.

Ads Stopped Running

Today, as the Private Industry Council is embroiled in controversy amid allegations of mismanagement, the phone calls only trickle in to the job hot line. The radio and newspaper ads stopped running in September when the PIC canceled its marketing contract after charges that government funds were mishandled.

The industry council’s board of directors decided not to hire a new public relations firm until the City Council acts on its $1.3-million operating budget request, which has been held up for six months until the crisis is resolved. Meanwhile, the PIC’s president, Dominick J. Ramos, has been under attack for several weeks and may be fired or asked to resign as early as today, board members said.

The troubles surrounding the PIC have made it even more difficult for some training programs to find jobs for former drug addicts, gang members and felons, according to interviews with managers at 10 job placement facilities. Although these programs rely primarily on their own recruiting efforts to secure job openings, the number of PIC referrals they receive has decreased in recent weeks.

In October, only 16 employers contacted the PIC about qualifying for tax credits and other cash incentives, down from 182 in August. The PIC reported receiving 167 calls last month from city residents seeking work, compared to 743 in August.

“We do get a lot of calls still from participants, but our employer calls have dropped because mainly we depend on radio and newspaper ads to attract our employers,” said Walter White, PIC assistant vice president for marketing. “Where we are really suffering as a result of this controversy is not attracting employers for the past two months.”

Under the Job Training Partnership Act, the federal government distributes money to the City Council, which is supposed to form a partnership with private industry to promote the program and funnel grants to local agencies. The PIC board consists of 29 business leaders who are appointed by the mayor. Seven of the positions are vacant. During the program year ending July 30, 8,388 residents were enrolled in federal job training programs, according to the city’s Community Development Department. Of those, 5,403 were placed in jobs and 1,836 continued their training into the current fiscal year.

When employers call the PIC offices with job openings, the positions are matched with the appropriate training and placement agencies, White said. These programs are reimbursed $4,100 for each client who lands a job. The unemployed people who contact the PIC are interviewed by White to verify that they are eligible for the federal program. Candidates must be U.S. citizens or legal aliens who reside in the city and meet federal guidelines to qualify as “economically disadvantaged.” The criteria vary depending on whether the applicant is an unemployed mother, a laid-off worker or a senior citizen.

Until recently, the PIC referred as many as three job orders from employers and 20 out-of-work clients per month to the Transwestern Institute of Word Processing, said Jackie Gentry, the agency’s job training coordinator. Transwestern, which received $660,575 in federal funds last year through the Private Industry Council, teaches word processing and computer programming to mostly single parents on welfare in South-Central Los Angeles.

Since the PIC ad campaign folded, the group has referred only one employer and two individuals to Transwestern, Gentry said.

Transwestern President Henry Feltenberg insisted that the PIC’s troubles have not affected his program. Feltenberg was one of three job training administrators who called The Times last week to retract earlier statements by their managers that the programs had suffered some minor setbacks due to the drop in PIC referrals.

“We don’t want to be caught in the middle of the controversy going on with the PIC,” said Yusa Chang, executive director of the United Chinese Restaurant Assn. The PIC funneled $251,099 in federal grants last year to the restaurant association to prepare low-income Asian residents in the West Los Angeles and Hollywood areas for entry-level positions in the food service industry.

Tom Sogi, job training manager for the Pacific Asian Consortium in Employment, told The Times last week, “It’s true that (the PIC) hasn’t been calling as regularly as before. We still have to get our own job leads.”

But Sogi called The Times the next day to say that his executive director, Kerry Doi, who also sits on the PIC board, instructed him to withdraw his comments because he did not have Doi’s permission to talk to the media.

The Pacific Asian Consortium in Employment received $1.1 million in grants over the last two years to provide training in English and clerical skills to mostly Korean immigrants. The consortium offers instruction in general office procedures, telephone etiquette and communication skills to about 120 poverty-level clients a year.

“Most of them are really reluctant to express themselves in interviews,” Sogi said of his clients. “We have to deal with a lot of cultural barriers as well as language problems.”

Several managers, including Sogi, said the PIC’s troubles will hurt the federal job training program. They said publicity surrounding the agency’s woes will further discourage employers to take a chance on hiring high-risk employees who enroll in the program.

“With all the negative publicity lately, it’s something that we have to try to work around,” Sogi said. “We try to explain to (employers) how things are set up. What we sort of have to do is more or less rely on our image and credibility.”

Reputation Damaged

Several PIC board members, who also serve as full-time executives for job training agencies that receive federal grants, agreed that the current troubles, along with the lack of a marketing campaign, have damaged the PIC’s reputation with the business community.

“The crucial point (of the marketing program) is to generate more employers to provide the jobs,” said John Mack, president of the Los Angeles Urban League, which received $1.7 million in grants over the last two years. “That is where I think it hurts.”

Sophia Esparza, executive director of the Chicana Action Center, an agency that received $528,413 in grants last year, said, “We need to market the PIC’s name in a more positive light. We have tried very much to give the city PIC a stature with the business community.”

Over the last four years, the Private Industry Council has paid more than $500,000 to Fouch-Roseboro & Associates to promote the job training programs to business leaders and the unemployed. Fouch-Roseboro, a Los Angeles public relations firm run by Barbara Fouch and her husband, former Dodger catcher John Roseboro, produced radio and TV spots, billboards, bus shelter ads and slide shows to promote the Private Industry Council.

But several job training managers criticized the PIC board of directors and its glitzy marketing campaign for failing to reach employers. They expressed frustration at seeing public service announcements for the Orange County Private Industry Council repeated on local television stations without seeing Bradley or McMahon promote the Los Angeles PIC.

Wants Better Marketing

“I personally would like to see more effort and money put into a more accelerated marketing campaign,” said Jennifer Oliver, program coordinator for the Hacienda La Puente Unified School District’s correctional education division. “It would allow Los Angeles employers in private industry to become more aware of what we’re doing.”

The school district received $298,336 through the PIC last year to provide job training to inmates at the Los Angeles County Jail.

The PIC marketing campaign was canceled after it was learned that Ramos extended Fouch-Roseboro’s contract last year without receiving the necessary authorization from the PIC board of directors. Other allegations include claims that Ramos improperly ordered the PIC staff to pay advances to Fouch-Roseboro on the $160,000 contract extension. By May, the PIC staff learned that its radio advertising had been pulled off the air for 2 1/2 months because Fouch-Roseboro had not paid radio stations KNX, KPWR and KFWB.

A recent audit of the marketing campaign identified $24,560 in questionable costs that the city may have to repay to the federal government.

Budget Held Up

The PIC’s request for a 14% budget increase has been held up by the City Council until all of the city’s concerns about the PIC are resolved, said Councilman Bob Farrell. Included in the budget is about $250,000 for marketing and public relations.

Farrell, chairman of the council’s grants committee, criticized the PIC board of directors last month for failing to solicit jobs, money and support from private industry. Farrell said the mayor’s office and the City Council are conducting an extensive review of the city’s partnership with the PIC.

At the same time, the PIC’s president faces charges that he mishandled the Fouch-Roseboro contract, solicited political campaign contributions from his staff, improperly used federal grant money to purchase a new 1986 Lincoln Continental and made several false claims on his resume when he was hired in 1984.

After 10 hours of meetings to discuss the charges against Ramos, the PIC board announced last week that the allegations “have been exaggerated and are, in many cases, unfounded.”

The PIC board refused to specify which allegations were exaggerated or unfounded. The board concluded that Ramos’ resume contained “some beneficial wording.”

City leaders are “very interested in getting to the bottom of the allegations . . . because we are the ones accountable and liable to the federal government,” Deputy Mayor Grace Davis said. “It is something that we are not going to put aside lightly.”

At least two PIC board members indicated in interviews that they expect Ramos to be fired or forced to resign, perhaps at a closed session today scheduled to discuss his job performance.

“We can go ahead, get rid of him, start all over again and create some credibility,” one director said.