The County’s Curious Set of Priorities

The news from the County Hall of Administration makes you wonder about priorities.

In August, we read that the county supervisors had spent $1.5 million on bonuses for top Los Angeles County executives.

In Tuesday’s paper, Times reporter Claire Spiegel reported that $1.4 million will have to be cut from the budget of a drug program designed to reduce the long lists of impoverished addicts awaiting treatment at residential facilities.

The actions were separate; the bonuses were initially approved last year while the drug budget is being cut now.

But the coincidence between the nearly identical sums of money--one bundle going to well-paid bureaucrats, the other being stripped away from needy addicts--was intriguing. Why spend money for executive bonuses when funds are needed for drug treatment?

Needle-using addicts spread AIDS. Some addicts end up killing, robbing and burglarizing to support their habits. Impoverished, addicted mothers give birth to disabled babies who become public charges. Mentally ill addicts are a nuisance and menace on the streets. Besides, drug addicts are sick people who need treatment.

Wednesday and Thursday, I talked to people in the county’s drug abuse program and in treatment centers to find the answer to the county’s spending priorities.

First, I was curious about just how much drug treatment the $1.4 million would buy.

On Wednesday, I visited the Tarzana Treatment Center in the San Fernando Valley.

The center is one of several treatment hospitals in the county that accept government-financed patients for residential and outpatient care.

There, patients go through the long routine of recovery from addiction. After about 10 days in the detox ward, they move into residential care--a regimen of counseling and discipline that may last for six months.

Afterward, they come back for many more months of outpatient treatment.

Fifty-eight of the center’s 87 beds have been set aside for the impoverished, whose bills are paid by a combination of federal, state and county funds.

Residential care costs the government $75 a day for each patient; detox, $200 a day. It’s expensive, but many drug treatment experts say it’s the best way to deal with most hard-core heroin and cocaine addicts.

The waiting list for these beds is long, running between 30 and 40 for Tarzana’s residential care facility. And that’s a small percentage of the large number of drug abusers waiting for a place in various treatment centers.

Two years ago, the federal government allocated money to a program to reduce waiting lists. Los Angeles County received about $1.4 million. The following year, Washington stopped the payments, but the state and county picked up the slack.

This year, both the state and county also dropped out, citing budget problems.

The Tarzana facility, one of the biggest in the county program, received $500,000 a year of the government money, which is expected to be gone by year’s end. That means “we will be cutting an average of 20 clients a day who would have been receiving treatment,” said Maury Weiner, the Tarzana administrator.

The waiting list at Tarzana hospital will grow longer.

So what of the priorities of a county government that would hand out executive bonuses one year and reduce drug treatment funds by almost exactly the same amount the next?

Turns out, lower-level officials in the county Drug Abuse Program Office made the reductions in the drug programs themselves and have yet to ask the supervisors for money to prevent the cuts.

This suggests either a lack of initiative or guts. Those familiar with county government can understand that.

The drug abuse people are under the purview of County Administrative Officer Richard Dixon, who writes the budget. He’s got his own priorities. He takes care of fellow county executives and provides his supervisorial bosses with plenty of money for their own operations.

Budget hearings are always brief and superficial and dissent isn’t tolerated in the county government family. If rebels from the drug abuse office had demanded a hearing at one of these sessions to plead their case for more money, they’d be in trouble.

So, yes, the supervisors can argue that nobody has told them about the waiting lists. But months ago, when they approved the bonuses, they certainly knew about the extent of this county’s--their county’s--drug problem. The waiting lists were no secret.

What if they’d been able to just say no. No bonuses. Let’s use the money to fight drugs.