Operating Without Accountability

News of runaway expense accounts at the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission is more than a story of public servants living the good life at taxpayers’ expense.

The story, by Times reporter Jane Fritsch, shows what can happen in the Southland’s shadowy form of government, where tremendous power is exercised by a bunch of little-known, extremely powerful public agencies that operate with little public accountability.

Certainly nobody was watching when LATC executive Jerry Givens routinely drove his car from the commission office to the Los Angeles Athletic Club, just three blocks away. He charged the commission for athletic club parking fees, as well as for food at breakfast and lunch meetings there.

The DASH minibus runs nearby. Since Givens is a transit man, you’d think he’d take the bus.

Another oddity is the way the commission crowd needed food to get their creative juices flowing. Meals, often catered, were hauled up to LACTC headquarters for meetings. Commission staff members ate their way through $6,000 worth of doughnuts in an 18-month period. Just thinking about it clogs my veins.

Then there are the credit cards with limits of up to $10,000 distributed to LACTC officials. Among the charges run up by commission Executive Director Neil Peterson was a bill from a Scottsdale, Ariz., golf school. After reporter Fritsch asked about Peterson’s expenses, he paid back $1,267, presumably because they were for personal items.

Add up the details, and here’s the bottom line: In an 18-month period, while companies were announcing huge layoffs and the recession worsened, the LACTC public servants spent at least $2.9 million on travel, meals and entertainment.

The LACTC is one of the most powerful and richest of the Southland’s obscure government agencies. Ironically, it was conceived as a reform agency, to straighten out L.A.’s perennial public transit mess at a time when nobody trusted the Southern California Rapid Transit District.

State legislation to create the new transit agency was required because buses and trains cross city and county boundaries. It took many years to shape the LACTC, beginning in the ‘70s and continuing through the ‘80s.

Why so long? Because of special interest warfare of a most unusual nature.

We usually think of special interest lobbyists as representing big companies, labor unions or organizations such as those for and against abortion.

What you may not know is there are other powerful lobbyists, and you pay their salaries and expenses with your tax dollars.

These advocates represent cities and counties. It might be argued that such lobbyists represent us, we the people. But that is not the case. They represent only the interests of their immediate employers--members of city councils and boards of supervisors. Their mandate is to preserve the power and jobs of their bosses.

Such turf protection dominated the shaping of the LACTC. The city of L.A. wanted to control the new agency. So did the county supervisors. Long Beach wanted a voice, as did the basin’s many smaller cities.

Mayors, council members and supervisors--important members of legislators’ political organizations--were summoned to Sacramento by the lobbyists. Traveling north at taxpayers’ expense, the hometown pols rolled up frequent-flyer miles as they twisted legislative arms.

Even after years of fighting, the combatants couldn’t agree. So they split up power, giving each faction appointees on the board of the new LACTC. To provide for accountability and oversight by elected officials, the L.A. mayor, an L.A. council member, council members from small cities and county supervisors were made members of the commission’s board.

Unfortunately, what resulted was a system with little accountability.

Mayor Tom Bradley and the Los Angeles County supervisors--the region’s most visible and powerful elected officials, who otherwise would be held accountable for transit--often missed the LACTC meetings. They sent staff members instead. So, if you want to blame the mayor or a county supe for the high living, forget it.

Where were they when the catered meals were ordered? Or when the credit card bills rolled in?

You know the answer: “It didn’t happen on my shift.”