Test Labs Face Exam From City : Safety: Workers check things from furniture to medical monitors. But critics say the work is duplicated in national laboratories.
That plush blue lounge chair might look harmless enough on the showroom floor. But what if the electrical lifting mechanism short-circuited and caught fire? Or a power surge threw grandma on the floor?
Workers in two obscure Los Angeles city agencies earn paychecks worrying about such things.
The 35 engineers, inspectors and clerks of the Los Angeles Electrical and Mechanical Testing Laboratories toil in an anonymous-looking, low-slung brick headquarters tucked away in Cypress Park, a residential neighborhood near Dodger Stadium.
Although little known to the public, the lab workers are authorized to scrutinize just about every appliance, fixture and building material used in Los Angeles--from toilet tanks and ice cream makers to high-tech medical monitors.
When they find products they believe are substandard or unsafe, they can order them removed from department store shelves or banned from construction sites.
And private industry has to pay for the tests, which may cost from $400 to $2,000.
Such powers have surprised and dismayed some business people for years. But their quiet protests did not receive much attention until the arrival this summer of businessman-turned-Mayor Richard Riordan, who has made it his mission to strip away unneeded government regulations.
Department of Building and Safety officials who oversee the labs have tried to defend the facilities by saying that they pay for themselves with the fees they generate. But budget figures for the past three years show that, including overhead, the labs have cost the city $655,000 more than they produced in fees over that period.
Although the Riordan Administration has not commented on the agencies’ place in Los Angeles government, the mayor has assigned an aide to look into the labs--which have fans and detractors in the city’s business community.
Some business owners said the labs help weed out inferior competitors and offer a seal of approval to their products. Others complain that product testing should be left to private labs and that the city’s reviews are discouraging new products and innovation.
One disdainful furniture store representative described how one piece of a bedroom set was forced to undergo a city electrical inspection after a chance visit by a Los Angeles lab supervisor. “He just put his hand on the headboard and thought it was too warm,” the businessman said. “That was it.”
Los Angeles is among a handful of local governments that operate testing laboratories. New York, Dade County, Fla. and Chicago are some of the others.
The city’s laboratories date back to the 1920s, when substandard electrical and mechanical products were common and state and federal governments were doing nothing to intervene. Los Angeles created the labs within the city’s Department of Building and Safety to enforce the municipal Electrical Code and Building Code.
After a spate of complaints in the 1930s about substandard electrical equipment and appliances, the labs were given the power to review those products, as well.
Los Angeles’ labs have continued to coexist with private laboratories--including nationwide giants like the nearly 100-year-old Underwriters Laboratories--that also test and certify the safety of products.
Although Los Angeles officials will accept certifications from many of these private labs, there are several reasons to maintain their own municipal operations, said Bob Bassman, overseer of the labs and assistant chief of the city’s Mechanical Bureau.
For one, Bassman said, the city’s electrical and building codes often place more stringent requirements on products than national codes. For another, some companies only want to use a product in a small area and an approval from Los Angeles is usually accepted by most neighboring cities. Finally, some pieces of equipment--such as a control panel from a recording studio--are more commonly used here and thus do not need certification from a national testing organization.
For whatever reason, 1,420 new items were tested by the two labs in the year that ended July 1. Another 2,222 items were reapproved, as most must be once a year.
On a recent afternoon, one engineer hovered over a meter measuring the electrical leakage from a medical diagnostic computer. A doctor from Good Samaritan Hospital was awaiting the outcome, to assure that it would be safe to monitor a patient’s vital signs with the device.
Nearby stood a row of toilets--in line to make sure they met the city’s low-flow water conservation requirements. And that electric-powered lounge chair was waiting to be moved out, after being plugged in and monitored for four hours without a short-circuit.
“What we do is perhaps more stringent, but it’s our opinion that it’s the way to do it because it’s providing for greater safety,” Bassman said.
The American Furniture Manufacturers Assn. does not share that view.
About a year ago, the group sued the city after about two dozen of its members objected to the Los Angeles electrical lab’s tests of products, such as headboards and china cabinets, which included wiring for light fixtures. The manufacturers claimed that the light fixtures had been certified safe by Underwriters Labs and labeled with the lab’s familiar UL stickers.
“They could never demonstrate there was a problem. People have had lights in china cabinets and curio cabinets forever,” said Douglas Brackett, executive vice president of the trade association. Bracket called the city’s requirement for additional tests “wrongheaded and illogical.”
But lab officials said the tests were legitimate because UL had not tested the devices after they were inserted in the furniture pieces, where they could be a fire hazard. Even officials at Underwriters Laboratories backed the city, according to Deputy City Atty. Ruth Ebner, who defended the case.
The city claimed victory when the furniture manufacturers dropped their suit this year. But Brackett said the manufacturers decided to give in because they were convinced that the city would create new rules if it lost in court.
The building and architectural trades have also had their gripes about the city labs.
A Los Angeles architect said it took him nearly two years to win approval for a light-weight concrete substitute to build countertops. “It was one of the worst cases of bureaucracy that I have seen,” he said.
Kate Diamond, president of the Los Angeles chapter of the American Institute of Architects, said such complaints are routine.
“I question why they repeat testing that has gone on in national testing labs,” Diamond said. “I wonder whether this is limiting trade and creating work that doesn’t add any value.”
Even the head of the Department of Building and Safety, which oversees the labs, admits that it has crossed his mind to close the facilities when he hears all the complaints.
“I think, ‘Why are we doing this?’ ” said general manager Warren O’Brien. “Why do we go to the trouble?”
But O’Brien said he quickly dismisses such doubts because he believes that “industry would come unglued. Because we are providing a service and we are providing it more efficiently and at a lower cost.”
Paul Blount, an engineer for Haworth Inc., a Michigan company that makes office partitions, seconds that point of view. The tests “take a lot of the products out of the field of companies that are making misrepresentations,” Blount said. “It’s an independent test that proves everything we are saying to our customers is true.”
Blount said the approval helps him to sell his products to companies operating elsewhere in Southern California because an L.A. lab approval is universally respected by building officials.
