Board Considers Ouster of Manager : County: Supervisors react to charges of mismanagement in a multimillion-dollar employment training program. Panel of business leaders has urged the action.

In an unusual move, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors is considering dismissal of a senior department head over alleged mismanagement of a multimillion-dollar job training program.

Supervisor Gloria Molina on Tuesday asked the board in closed session to consider the dismissal of Community and Senior Citizens Services Department Director Robert G. Medina, officials said. Her appeal came as the board weighed a request by a panel of private business that a large, federally funded job training program be pulled out of Medina’s department.

The county’s Private Industry Council, a group of business officials who jointly manage the jobs program with the county, are unhappy with Medina’s performance and claim that he has siphoned off too much money for administrative and other overhead expenses.

PIC Chairman Arthur Hirshberg, armed with a critical study by the consulting firm of Coopers & Lybrand, alleged that the county bureaucrats are incompetent spendthrifts interested only in protecting their paychecks.

But county officials, including the chief administrative officer and the auditor/controller, who have investigated the feud, chalk up the PIC’s criticism to personality differences. They are recommending that Medina’s department be given even greater control over the PIC and the millions of dollars in the Jobs Training Partnership Act program. The program disburses federal funds to private firms that agree to hire and train disadvantaged residents.

The 17-member PIC board voted overwhelmingly last fall to ask the Board of Supervisors to shift the program from Medina’s department to a more appropriate county agency.

Hirshberg said that the funds could be better spent on actual job training than on an expensive administrative apparatus. According to the Coopers & Lybrand study conducted last fall, administrative and overhead charges to the job training program tripled in the past year, to a total of $6.7 million.

The county does not dispute those figures. In fact, the county’s auditor-controller and chief administrative officer said the department should be applauded for aggressively recovering county expenses from the federal program.

Medina could not be reached Tuesday. But in an earlier written response to the Coopers & Lybrand report, he noted that state and federal officials have approved all of the administrative charges. The auditor-controller and chief administrative officer agreed that all of the charges are appropriate.

Still, a majority of the Board of Supervisors on Tuesday said that they are in favor of moving the job training program out of Medina’s department.

Molina and Supervisors Yvonne Brathwaite Burke and Michael Antonovich all said they favor moving the program, though details still must be worked out. Supervisor Ed Edelman said he was undecided on the matter and Supervisor Deane Dana said he supports the administrative officer’s recommendation that the program remain under Medina’s control.

The matter comes back to the board for a vote next week.

Also left unresolved at Tuesday’s meeting was the status of Medina.

Molina, who like other supervisors would not discuss details of the closed-door meeting, said, “I don’t think he’s been an effective department head,” adding, “I’m very concerned with the JTPA program.”

Burke said the issues of the movement of program and Medina’s status will probably have to be resolved all at once.

Medina, 69, has been an employee of the county for 39 years. He began with the Probation Department in 1955, and was named director of the county Department of Senior Citizens Affairs in 1971. He was made director of the consolidated Department of Community and Senior Citizens Services in 1984.