Panel Attacks Funding Cuts for Drug Program : Law enforcement: The county unit in charge of apportioning money says the city of Los Angeles allocates too much to police pensions.

At the urging of Councilwoman Joy Picus, a Los Angeles City Council panel voted Monday to join other city officials in attacking a little-known county committee over apportionment of federal funds to underwrite an innovative narcotics-trafficking crackdown in Canoga Park and Van Nuys.

Critics, including an aide to Mayor Tom Bradley, maintain that the county Anti-Drug Abuse Steering Committee should allocate $1.75 million of a $7-million grant to the city’s FALCON program, which they credit with reducing drug traffic at once-notorious Lanark Park in Canoga Park.

However, the chairman of the committee--Deputy Dist. Atty. Stephen Kay--contends that the city should receive no more than $1.05 million because city budgeting procedures assign such a high proportion of such grants to the cost of police pensions.

That amount will keep the program going for eight or nine months, but not for a year, Picus told the council’s Public Safety Committee on Monday. Picus, whose district includes Lanark Park, urged the committee to petition Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner to pressure Kay into granting the city’s budget request.

The committee voted to make such a recommendation.

“Ira’s deputy was brutal to the city,” Picus said. She later said she thinks that Reiner, who was forced into a runoff in the June 2 election, may be reluctant to get into a fight with the city over an issue such as drug trafficking while he is politically vulnerable.

Reiner could not be reached for comment. His press secretary said he “was out-of-pocket for the next week.”

Kay said that even if Reiner ordered him to reverse his stand, five other members of the 10-member committee--which includes representatives of a number of local law enforcement agencies--voted with him and Reiner has no authority over them.

The 2-year-old FALCON program employs non-traditional law enforcement efforts to attack drug trafficking, including pressuring landlords and property owners to evict drug dealers, hire security guards and fence their properties.

If landlords fail to take adequate steps to stop drug dealing, their properties can be seized as public nuisances.

“We’re trying to get at the root of the problem and making arrests does not always do that,” Police Capt. Richard Wahler, who oversees the FALCON unit, said Monday. “Most of the time we’re not going after individuals but after a site or an environmental situation.”

Without the full amount the city requested, “we’ll probably have to drop it in February or March of next year,” said Los Angeles Police Sgt. Kirk Albanese, a FALCON unit member.

Kay, however, said he and other members of the committee, which has the final say over how to spend $7 million in federal Anti-Drug Abuse Act money for Los Angeles County, refused to grant the full amount of the city’s request because it was padded with pension benefits and expenses.

“We’re not going to buy a Rolls-Royce with federal grant money,” Kay said in an interview. Particularly disturbing, he said, was that the city asked that the grant pay the benefits package costs of the Los Angeles Police Department members of the FALCON unit. Half of the unit’s 16 members are LAPD officers.

“Their benefits are 69% of their salaries; they’re outlandish,” Kay said. “I’m not going to vote for 69% benefits.”

He said other agencies that are getting the federal money, such as the district attorney’s office and Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, have pension benefits that are about 27% of their pay.

Assistant City Atty. Mary Clare Molidor, who works in the FALCON unit, called it unfair to “punish this program because of the LAPD’s benefit package, over which we have no control.”

Mike Thompson, a criminal justice planning aide to Bradley, also attacked Kay and the steering committee’s May 12 decision, calling it a “public mugging.” Thompson said the mayor’s office believes that Kay is the key to turning around the decision.

In a press release last week, Picus also fired away at Reiner, saying he was sending mixed signals. At the same time, Reiner complains about gangs and drug dealing, “his deputy is taking almost a half-million dollars away from the only community-based anti-drug, anti-gang program that’s working,” Picus said then, referring to the difference between last year’s funding and the funding proposed this year by the committee.

Lanark Park has been one of the biggest successes of FALCON, Picus said.

For the past eight months, “we’ve had it under control,” she said. “It was effective in getting the drug dealers out of the park and putting young people back into it. . . . It’s the best program. It makes me crazy to think they’re going to hurt it.”

The FALCON unit is now trying to reduce drug sales on Delano and Erwin streets between Vesper and Kester avenues, at Roscoe and Sepulveda boulevards, on the 8500 and 8600 blocks of Willis Avenue, and in the 16500 block of Blythe Street.