Wachs Repeats Call for Audit of Sewer Program

Bolstered by calls from whistle-blowers alleging abuses ranging from lucrative contracts to payroll padding, Los Angeles City Councilman Joel Wachs renewed his call Monday for a sweeping outside audit and immediate 5% cut in the city’s massive sewer program.

“It’s time to bring this system under control,” Wachs told a City Hall news conference.

The San Fernando Valley councilman and mayoral candidate first suggested the 5% reduction in the $838-million sewer construction and maintenance fund in October as a way to free enough money to hire 650 Los Angeles police officers without raising taxes.

Since then, Wachs said his office has been contacted by four whistle-blowers offering details of inefficiency and wasteful spending involving the massive Hyperion sewage treatment plant in El Segundo and the Terminal Island plant near Long Beach.

One of the callers, using the moniker T.I. and insisting on anonymity, portrayed the Terminal Island treatment plant as a place where favored employees are rewarded with overtime and are paid an extra $500 a month to carry an emergency response beeper. The caller said millions of dollars have been wasted on consultants, an end-of-the-fiscal year spending frenzy in 1991, and excessive design features.

The informants did not appear with Wachs, although the councilman’s office arranged for T.I. to speak to a Times reporter Monday.

On the basis of information from T.I. and others, Wachs charged that the city sewer program is a “wasteful and bloated bureaucracy” where cost controls are nonexistent. While he said he had no evidence of criminal wrongdoing, Wachs suggested that major consulting contracts to oversee various aspects of the sewer program may be awarded to firms which are major campaign contributors at City Hall.

Short-term contracts, some involving tens of millions of dollars, are granted without competitive bidding and are routinely renewed without being subjected to any real scrutiny by the City Council, Wachs charged.

City officials had no immediate response to specific allegations raised by Wachs but said they were reviewing the information and would respond later.

In the face of Wachs’ call to immediately slash $42 million from sewer program spending, Bob Hayes, spokesman for the Board of Public Works, denied that there is enough waste and inefficiency to allow for such a cut. “I don’t think it is true,” he said. Hayes took exception to Wachs’ “saying our people are inefficient, that they are wasting the taxpayers’ money.” But, he noted, “It’s a political year.”

Still, Felicia Marcus, a member of the city Board of Public Works, which oversees the sewer program, embraced the idea of an outside audit of the program, saying it is “not a bad idea.” And she pledged that the board would investigate and review all of the whistle-blowers’ allegations.

“It’s a very big program that mobilized very quickly to meet a very huge task to totally revamp the city’s sewage system,” Marcus said. “It’s a very large and expensive task.”

She said the city had been “using Santa Monica Bay as a toilet,” before the massive program was initiated in the late 1980s to ensure that Los Angeles meets state and federal water quality standards.

More than $3 billion will be spent before the turn of the century to upgrade the city’s treatment plant and repair or replace lines that feed the facility.

In a program that large, Marcus said, suggestions from whistle-blowers, audits and employees are important to “find cheaper ways of doing things.”

While calling for the across-the-board cut, Wachs said he did not want to jeopardize city efforts to meet water quality standards.