Garcetti Crusades for Funds : Law: D.A. uses talk shows and public forums to increase pressure on supervisors. He warns that many criminals will go free if county cuts his budget.

With the calculating polish of a seasoned campaigner, Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti is waging a high-profile, high-stakes battle to stave off any reductions in his budget while many other county agencies face certain cuts.

In the last week alone, Garcetti has made an impassioned public plea to the Board of Supervisors, appeared almost daily on radio and television talk shows and sought support from other prominent elected officials, including Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan, who is to address the supervisors today on Garcetti’s behalf.

Not even the Sheriff’s Department, which is known for aggressively protecting its funding with flamboyant gestures, has mounted the kind of campaign Garcetti has.

In an effort to pressure the board to give him the $128.5-million annual budget that he insists is the bare minimum needed to do his job, he has targeted business owners and chambers of commerce with a core message:

Anything less could force him to lay off up to 188 of his deputies, and he will stop prosecuting the more than 250,000 misdemeanors filed each year in areas that do not have their own city attorneys to handle those crimes.

Garcetti says he will concentrate his office’s efforts instead on violent crimes and other felonies.

“It will mean petty thieves, bad check writers and graffiti vandals will have a field day, committing crimes that harm your businesses with no sanctions attached,” Garcetti said ominously at a recent meeting at the Glendale Galleria that attracted suburban business leaders and local elected officials.

Criminals already jailed would fill prison yards with their cheers when they got the news, he told the group.

Some observers described such talk as exploitative and said Garcetti has forgotten to turn off “the dramatics” he recently used in Sacramento to help pressure the governor and the Legislature to extend a half-cent sales tax surcharge for public safety. Los Angeles County’s portion of the sales tax money comes to $200 million; although Garcetti has been promised $18.5 million from that source, he wants $19.1 million more.

The district attorney’s supporters deny that Garcetti is using scare tactics. They say he is only doing what is necessary to keep his already overworked office intact and argue that previous cutbacks already threaten the prosecutor’s effectiveness.

All agree, however, that the strategy of pressuring the supervisors by going directly to the people who elected them--especially in the business community--is a potent one in crime-weary Los Angeles County.

Many residents, according to these observers, may be willing to do without libraries, health clinics and other human services if they can go to bed believing their chief prosecutor has the tools to put all criminals behind bars.

Garcetti got a supportive reception at the meeting in Glendale.

Bill Greer, a retired Lockheed purchasing agent, said Garcetti is right in insisting on no cuts in his budget.

“Oh, I’m with him,” Greer said at the end of Garcetti’s speech.

Glendale Mayor Larry Zarian said he would lobby the board of supervisors.

“Law enforcement comes first and some departments will just have to bite the bullet,” said Zarian. “I’m concerned that (Garcetti’s budget) not be cut.”

Garcetti is counting on people such as Greer and Zarian to help him win his case with the supervisors, who have been hearing testimony on the budget since July 12 and are expected to begin their deliberations next week.

“The board certainly blinked when the Sheriff’s Department brought them to their knees,” said a Municipal Court judge who asked not to be named. He noted that the board recently knuckled under and came up with more money for Sheriff Sherman Block after he threatened to close some jails and set hundreds of prisoners free.

“I thought it was really shameful,” the judge said. “The hospitals, if they had any sense, would put sick people out on the street on their stretchers. That is what the board is encouraging.”

But a Garcetti supporter, lawyer Winston Kevin McKesson, disagreed.

“You can’t just shrink the D.A.’s office like any other agency,” McKesson said. “If you do, you’ll have to deal with the consequences.

“The average person doesn’t understand how many cases these deputies have,” he said, “and most citizens are concerned about their safety.”

By Garcetti’s own reckoning, he has or is close to having the support of two supervisors--Mike Antonovich and Deane Dana--and needs to pick up one more vote in order to receive full funding.

Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke could not be reached for comment on how she views the district attorney’s funding request.

But Garcetti is likely to face opposition from Supervisors Gloria Molina and Ed Edelman.

Molina chided him at a recent board meeting, saying his circumstances were not as dire as he was making out.

Edelman, in an interview, said he sympathizes with Garcetti, but expects the district attorney’s budget to be cut some, just like everyone else’s.

“To think he is going to escape any cuts is unrealistic,” Edelman said. “What about the safety police at parks, (welfare) offices, and what about emergency trauma centers that also supply a degree of public safety?”

Garcetti argues that the Legislature never intended the money from the sales tax extension to be used for things such as park security and lifeguards.

Moreover, he asserts, he and Block deserve the funds because they successfully lobbied the governor and the Legislature to approve the extension. They also were instrumental in placing on the November ballot a proposal to make the tax permanent, which would guarantee a steady source of additional funding for public safety.

“I used the leverage I had to try to protect the community,” Garcetti said in an interview.

“I’m the one who has been fighting the fight” for more state money for the county, he said, adding that he also has lobbied the state to give the county the authority to impose so-called “sin taxes” on alcohol and tobacco.

Unless supervisors fund his office and the Sheriff’s Department at last year’s levels, Garcetti said, he will make sure voters are reminded of that in the fall.

“I will not campaign against (the November measure to extend the sales tax), but I will be honest with the voters and the result of that is that it will not be approved.”

Some county officials believe that Garcetti’s stand may prove persuasive.

“On the one hand, there is the argument that (the district attorney and the sheriff) should absorb inflation like everyone else,” said Gerald Roos, a senior aide to Chief Administrative Officer Harry Hufford. “On the other hand, the board may wish to not curtail them to secure their wholehearted support for the sales tax in November.”

In the meantime, Garcetti continues his full court press.

On Monday, he met with the chambers of commerce of Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, Sherman Oaks, Encino, Inglewood and Culver City.

On Wednesday’s agenda: the California Grocers Assn.