The Go-Betweens : Fed Up With a Costly Judicial System, an Increasing Number of Individuals and Businesses Are Trying to Resolve Their Disputes With the Help of Trained Mediators, Conciliators and Arbitrators

IN FEBRUARY, 1991, AFTER A Compton police officer killed two Samoan brothers while investigating a domestic disturbance, Samoan tribal Chief Tua’au Pele Faletogo knew he had to act fast.

Samoans were “getting ready to burn down Compton,” said Faletogo, who summoned other matais , or chiefs, for an emergency meeting.

The chiefs faced a dilemma: How could they demand justice for what the Samoan community perceived as a grave affront without inciting more violence?

“The Polynesian way is that we talk things out,” said Faletogo, who contacted the Asian Pacific American Dispute Resolution Center in Downtown Los Angeles for help. “People were very upset and I knew there would be a lot of people hurt unless we resolved it in a peaceful way.”

After two years of mediation with representatives of the dispute resolution center and the U.S. Department of Justice, the two parties finally reached an agreement last month. The city of Compton agreed to hire four people to establish programs dealing with such issues as police brutality and the city’s minority-hiring practices.

As the public becomes increasingly disgusted with the time and money required to send a case through the judicial system, an increasing number of individuals, groups and businesses are trying to resolve their problems through alternative dispute resolution. The technique holds special promise for Central Los Angeles, where mediation may provide a more effective way of dealing with ethnic disputes and other disagreements before they turn violent.

“Most of us raised in the United States believe that if we have an issue, we take it to court,” said Dennis Westbrook, project director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Dispute Resolution Center, which serves South-Central and surrounding communities. “But if we change our mind set around and try collaborative decision-making, we’ll be better able to work out solutions to our problems.”

Alternative dispute resolution provides an opportunity to work out a mutually acceptable agreement with the help of a trained mediator, conciliator or arbitrator. Both parties must agree to participate.

In mediation, disputants usually meet face to face to resolve their problems at a neutral site. During conciliation, both parties meet individually with a conciliator, who tries to work out a mutually acceptable agreement. Arbitrators hear testimony and then render a judgment.

Through mediation, Crenshaw resident Nora Clay was able to resolve a dispute with a mechanic over the work he had done on her 1985 Cadillac this year.

“The man fixed my car transmission, but it still didn’t run good,” Clay said. “It broke down, and I had to get it towed.”

After a mediator from the city attorney’s office stepped in, the mechanic agreed to refund Clay the $1,000 she paid him.

“He came to my house to give me the money, and he wanted to pay me even more than the agreement,” Clay said. “He was so nice, I couldn’t take the extra money.”

“That lady,” Clay said of the mediator who handled her case, “boy, she could take care of business. Lord, if we had those kinds of lawyers, the world would be so sweet.”

Mediation also helped resolve a dispute at the Estrada Courts housing project in Boyle Heights after tensions erupted between tenants and the project manager. Some tenants believed the manager had been giving preferential treatment to her friends and relatives, said Tom Cross, a mediator in the city attorney’s office.

The situation was resolved last fall after a representative from the Los Angeles Housing Authority agreed to send tenants information on how to file a formal complaint.

“The residents had a conflict with how they perceived our policies,” said Lucille Morris, the Los Angeles Housing Authority’s housing management director, who attended the mediation sessions organized by the city attorney’s office. “I felt it worked out well and was a very fair process.”

Although Faletogo, the Samoan chief, said he was satisfied with the agreement that was reached with the city of Compton, he said it was very frustrating.

After Officer Alfred F. Skiles Jr. shot Pouvi and Itali Tualaulelei 19 times, “there were hard feelings on both sides,” Faletogo said. “The people from the city were on the defensive and the meetings were hitting a cement block,” he said.

However, Compton City Manager Howard Caldwell said he never regarded the issues being discussed during mediation as “disputes.”

“We just wanted to improve the channels of communication, and the process of having a third party just facilitated that,” Caldwell said.

Taxpayer-funded dispute resolution services began in 1986 when a new state law allowed counties to increase civil court filing fees by $3 to fund the programs.

Two years later, Los Angeles County opened eight dispute-resolution centers using trained volunteer mediators. The county now operates 11 centers and charges as much as $50 an hour, depending on the income of the client and the nature of the dispute.

While more people are using alternative dispute resolution to resolve such issues as landlord-tenant disagreements or roommate problems, officials say budget cuts are jeopardizing the county’s programs.

Since 1990, the county’s dispute resolution budget has been slashed 40%, from $2.5 million to $1.5 million, according to county figures. Officials at the county-funded agencies, which have resolved more than 6,100 cases this fiscal year, say the budget cuts are forcing them to turn away clients because they do not have the staff to process all the requests.

“What’s going to happen is that there will be a continual decrease in services at a time when services are needed more than ever,” said Lauren Burton, executive director of the Los Angeles County Bar Assn.’s Dispute Resolution Services. “Everyone says how wonderful these services are and how much they save money . . . but nobody wants to pay for it.”

Dispute resolution centers have been forced to cut their budgets because the county initially overestimated the amount of revenue it could draw from the additional $3 court filing fee. While the county estimated revenues of about $2.5 million, it only collects about $1.5 million annually, said Henry Knawls, the county’s division chief of community service. “We were too optimistic,” Knawls said. “But instead of reducing the budget all at once, we did it incrementally.”

About 60% of the cases the eight county-funded agencies handle are resolved, Knawls said. While some problems are resolved in an hour, other disputes are discussed for months and still no resolution is reached.

“The hardest cases to resolve are those between neighbors and family members because the animosity has built up,” said John Haynes, a mediator with the Los Angeles County Department of Consumer Affair’s dispute settlement services. “It’s not just the issues, it’s all the problems that have built up over the years.”

Mediators say one of the biggest challenges about the process is getting both parties to participate. Since the process is voluntary, if one side chooses not to participate, the case ends there.

Westbrook said it is often difficult for his agency to persuade people to participate in the process because it “has been foreign to the majority of inner-city residents.”

However, Westbrook and Marcia Choo, program director of the Asian Pacific American Dispute Resolution Center, said they are convinced that alternative dispute resolution can play an important role in preventing violence, particularly among people of different ethnic groups.

“People are angry and there’s a lot of antagonism out there,” Choo said. “It’s naive to think that mediation can solve ethnic problems, but this multicultural collaboration at least is chipping away at the problem.”

Choo said she often handles cases that deal with cultural misunderstandings. When people of different ethnicities are disputing, Choo said she will try to call in a mediator of each ethnicity to make both sides feel comfortable.

“Most disputes are not about the money,” Choo said. “It’s about honor or someone feeling offended by someone else. Mediation deals with emotions and feelings, and a lot of times, people are simply looking for an apology.”

Others have used dispute resolution to take on government bureaucracies. Unhappy with the response that riot victims received from the U.S. Small Business Administration and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, several prominent Korean-Americans called for mediators to intervene.

“The Clinton Administration should act to reopen cases rejected by the (Small Business Administration) and the (Federal Emergency Management Administration) and establish a dispute resolution panel with those two agencies in Los Angeles,” wrote Stewart Kwoh, Angela Oh and Bong Hwan Kim in a May 3 commentary article in The Times.

Kwoh is the executive director of the Asian Pacific American Legal Center, Oh is president of the Korean American Bar Assn. of Southern California, and Kim is executive director of the Korean Youth and Community Center.

The day after the article appeared, the SBA sent loan officer Jack Koulbanis to Los Angeles to help riot victims resolve their conflicts with the agency. Koulbanis has set up an office at the Assn. of Korean-American Victims of the Los Angeles Riots in Koreatown.

“We’re not a dispute resolution center, but we’re sitting face to face and trying to connect,” said Koulbanis, adding that a number of factors played into SBA’s decision to send him to Koreatown. “We’re trying to take it case by case and figure out what the problem is and what we can do to resolve it.”

The county’s dispute resolution program now depends on the efforts of about 3,000 volunteer mediators, who undergo a minimum of 25 hours of training before they are certified. Most agencies do not require volunteers to have legal experience, but they ask for at least a one-year commitment.

Tom Cross, a former radio announcer who has served as a volunteer mediator for the city attorney’s office for two years, said the work is gratifying but difficult. Of the 32 people he trained with, only about five are still active with the program.

“Volunteers start with good intentions, but find that the work can be very tedious and very demanding on the schedule,” he said.

However, agencies say they do not have any trouble recruiting volunteers.

“We have a waiting list for people who want to become mediators,” Burton said. “But minorities and bilingual volunteers are what’s really needed.”

Along with individuals, many businesses are turning toward alternative dispute resolution as a way to cut legal costs.

Motorola Inc., based in Schaumburg, Ill., requires its 80 in-house attorneys to seek all possible alternatives before they defend a case in court. Lawyers who still go to court must fill out a form estimating legal costs, likely damages and chances of victory.

Motorola estimates that its dispute resolution program, which began in 1984, has saved the company time, energy and millions of dollars in legal fees.

“Out of 134 cases we handle in a year, we resolve 80 in alternative dispute resolution,” said Richard Weise, Motorola’s general counsel who designed the company’s resolution program. “We estimate a savings of at least 75%.”

But even more important, said Weise, dispute resolution has enabled the company to salvage important relationships.

“The real cost to the company when a lawsuit was filed was the effect it had on our relationships with our customers, the government and other people we deal with,” he said. “When you have a lawsuit that lasts two, three or four years, it can be very destructive to that relationship.”

Resolving Disputes

Here are some agencies that provide alternative dispute resolution services. Fees vary according to income level. * Asian Pacific American Dispute Resolution Center (213) 747-9943. * Los Angeles City Attorney’s Dispute Resolution Center (213) 237-2744. * Los Angeles County Bar Assn.’s Dispute Resolution Services (213) 896-6533 * Los Angeles County Department of Consumer Affairs Dispute Settlement Service (213) 974-0825 * Martin Luther King Dispute Resolution Center (213) 295-8582