L.A. to Quit Paying for Staff Exercise Classes : Finances: Housing Department employees will have to cover cost of their yoga, stretching and aerobics sessions. Programs were viewed as morale aids.

Employees at the Los Angeles Housing Department can still learn to wrench themselves into the lotus position if they like, but starting next week they’ll have to pay for the experience themselves.

City Controller Rick Tuttle said Friday that he would no longer let the city and taxpayers pay for lunchtime and after-work classes in yoga, stretching and aerobics at the Housing Department offices.

“The taxpayers should not be asked to support a subsidy of exercise programs that are only available to a selected number of city employees,” Tuttle said in a letter to the Housing Department.

Department officials quickly canceled the classes, conceding they should have received approval from the City Council and mayor to conduct them.

The classes cost the city $8,745. Tuttle suggested to housing officials that he was more disturbed by their lack of official approval than by the thought of city workers attaining physical and karmic release.

“This letter should in no way be read as critical of the importance of (the) wellness program and exercise in particular,” Tuttle wrote.

In fact, the City Council and mayor had for nearly a decade approved of another city department contracting with a private firm to teach yoga and other classes. The Community Development Department spent $102,326 from 1985 until this year on such classes, in what was designed as a pilot project to study whether such “wellness” classes reduced employee sick time and increased productivity.

That department canceled its yoga and other classes with Symbiosis Inc. in June. A department official wrote that the classes were “professional and dependable” but not affordable under the city’s serious budget constraints.

It is not clear in the city’s files whether anyone decided if yoga made the department--which administers social service programs and grants--a happier and more productive place.

But Matt Callahan, director of administration for the Housing Department, said he believes the classes helped his department. Sessions were attended by up to 20 employees and helped “save time and money by cutting down on sick time and improve employee morale,” Callahan said.

He said morale building became particularly important a couple of years ago, when the Housing Department moved to new offices at 4th and Spring streets. “A lot of employees were unhappy about moving to the heart of Skid Row,” Callahan said.

Tim Lynch, a deputy city controller, said that yoga should only be taxpayer supported if the productivity benefits can be proved. “Otherwise, there should be a cost for the service,” he said, “like the rest of the world has to pay.”

Callahan agreed that the department will not stage more city-supported classes without official approval. But he denied that just Housing Department employees had benefited from the sessions.

“We had people here from a lot of other departments,” said Callahan, “the CDD, the (Community Redevelopment Agency) . . . even the controller’s office.”