Interagency Dispute Leads to Proposal

It all started with a pile of, well, compost.

City Councilwoman Laura Chick is so infuriated over the Department of Water and Power’s refusal to help the Los Angeles Police Department remove a mound of decomposing wood chips in a crime investigation that she will introduce a motion at Tuesday’s City Council meeting to instruct city managers to adopt a policy of interdepartmental cooperation.

The altercation came when police, trying to prove that a Pacoima man committed insurance fraud, asked to use a DWP bulldozer to see whether the car was hidden under the compost pile in the man’s yard.

“It’s ironic that with both the civil unrest and the firestorms, we see both the LAPD and LAFD have these wonderful mutual aid arrangements with other fire and law enforcement agencies outside the city, but we’re not cooperating within our own city family,” Chick said Thursday.

The policy would include sharing of resources whenever possible and the naming of a liaison within each city department to help facilitate such requests for aid. Chick said her office is not aware of any such mutual aid policy now in existence among city agencies.

“Sometimes there may be situations when there are budget considerations preventing them from helping, but there needs to be a very good reason within the city family why one hand isn’t reaching out and helping the other,” Chick said.

Chick said she would also introduce a motion Tuesday asking Department of Water and Power officials to explain why police were not able to use the DWP equipment to move the compost.

The equipment would have been used to bulldoze through a 2 1/2-acre pile of rotting leaves and tree branches in a Pacoima wood yard, where the 1988 Cadillac convertible was hidden.

Police instead persuaded a co-owner of the yard to retrieve the rotting Cadillac from the refuse heap, allowing them to arrest William Dunlap, the car’s owner, for insurance fraud. Dunlap, a co-owner of the wood yard, had collected $24,000 from his insurance company after reporting the car stolen in 1992.

“This is simply one incident that is inexcusable,” Chick said. “We don’t know if this is a big problem in the city or not. But we want to jump on it and see why it is happening.”