Roberti Gets OK for L.A. Schools Audit : Education: Committee approves study of the district’s budget as lawmaker readies plan to carve up the system.

Turning up the heat on the Los Angeles Unified School District, Senate leader David A. Roberti (D-Van Nuys) on Wednesday received permission from a legislative committee to conduct an independent audit of district budget operations, including examining how accessible its financial information is to the public.

The move by Roberti comes days before he is scheduled to unveil his controversial plan to carve up the 650,000-student system into smaller, autonomous districts--an idea he and San Fernando Valley activists say would give parents more control over their children’s education.

Some school officials and Los Angeles minority leaders have vowed to fight the Roberti plan because they say it is racially and class motivated, and is reminiscent of the anti-busing fights of the 1970s. They say it would lock minority students into inferior schools with inexperienced teachers.

Roberti said Wednesday his call for the outside audit is not related to the break-up drive. Any audit findings, he said, would be “tangential, peripheral, accidental at best” to his quest of dismantling the second-largest school district in the country.

But Roberti spokesman Steven Glazer said the outside audit and the break-up plan share one belief--that the district is just too big.

“The old cliche that the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing applies to this district because it is too large,” said Glazer. “They control more than $3 billion in taxpayer money and their failure to account for all of it is very troubling.”

Roberti’s request for the audit was approved unanimously and without debate Wednesday by the Senate Rules Committee, which he heads. The vote gives the state auditor general $75,000 to hire an outside expert to evaluate accuracy, accessibility and timeliness of the district’s “budgetary, accounting and management information systems,” according to a memo released by Roberti’s office late Wednesday. The audit is expected to be completed by mid-April.

In Los Angeles, a school district spokeswoman said the Roberti audit was unnecessary.

Diana Munatones said the school board is scheduled next week to approve a $500,000 contract with the Arthur Andersen accounting firm to conduct a management, budgetary and efficiency audit.

“We want to know how efficient are we, given the monies we have,” Munatones said.

The fight between Roberti and the district over budgets and financial information stems from an incident in December, when he unveiled a report by the state legislative analyst’s office that claimed the district could not account for $73 million of its $400-million budget shortfall.

Angry district officials responded by accusing the state agency of slipshod work. They quickly prepared an itemization that satisfied the analyst’s office.

Roberti said Wednesday that his request for the outside audit was inspired by the legislative analyst’s inability to get timely information on the $73 million. He said the audit contract underscores a lack of faith in the district’s ability to control its state monies.

“I’m still confounded by the fact that it took so long to get a report (from the Los Angeles district) on its budget,” he said.

Times staff writer Henry Chu also contributed to this story.