BUREAUCRACY WATCH : On No Account

An audit recently found that some Metropolitan Water District directors had not filed to justify their sometimes liberal travel expenses for years, even though the Met paid the bills. One way to explain this omission is that the drought kept accountants too busy making sure nobody wasted a drop of water.

Granted that doesn’t come to grips with the fact that some of the expenses were incurred before the drought began, but even if it did, the theory would not--pardon the expression--hold water.

The truth is that over the years the board of directors of the MWD operated more like an exclusive, mostly men’s, club than a group responsible for setting policies that would ensure ample water supplies for 15 million people. In literature at any rate, exclusive clubs often were loath to bring up money with their gentlemen members.

What gave the MWD its clublike atmosphere was that the water supply was not in jeopardy and policy decisions usually involved whether to back some new dam or canal.

With the drought and a rather sudden shortage of both cash and the will to build big new water projects, the role of the MWD has changed. The policies on which directors must vote in coming years will be much tougher; so, it is nice to know, will the rules on expenses.

But one thing about the new rules makes us nervous--less about expenses than about the water supply. Some directors oppose the expense account rules. We wonder how that plays with the adage that if you take care of the little things, the big things will take care of themselves.