Math Errors Damage Residents’ Faith in City : It took too long to admit goofs in important calculations

If you find a significant error on your credit card bill or long distance telephone bill, chances are you’ll want it cleared up immediately; certainly before the arrival of the next month’s receipts.

If your math is grossly out of whack and you underpay the Internal Revenue Service and/or the California Franchise Tax Board by some dramatic amount, you’re guaranteed to hear from them in short order.

And if you tell your teacher that you don’t deserve an F on that calculus exam because you’re sure you’ll figure out the correct answers by the time that graduation ceremonies roll around, there are two possibilities, and one certainty. You’ll get a laugh, or get sent to the principal’s office, and you’ll still have that F.

Apparently, things work a little differently for the Los Angeles city government, where it can take months (or years) to find or at least explain huge numerical errors. It’s also a place where those errors can be brushed off as inconsequential because the right numbers would have been determined within the next few years.

Our first example involves the Donald C. Tillman Water Reclamation Plant in the Sepulveda Basin. One reason that it’s important to get the numbers straight on this facility is because of the need for possible expansion in sewage treatment in the Valley. This is a controversial matter because the plant has neighbors who aren’t thrilled with its smell or its location.

One plan for the city’s future sewage treatment needs said that Tillman would need to expand its capacity by 50% in the next 16 years (wrong) and that its capacity could be quintupled over the next century without the need for any public environmental review (wrong).

Exacerbating the incident were the 4 1/2 months that passed between the time that this newspaper first inquired about the probability of errors and the city’s acknowledgment of error. After saying that the mistakes were “inconsequential” because they were discovered well before the year 2010, a city official said that the delay in ‘fessing up was due to a “general reluctance on the part of government workers to explain that something is wrong.”

Well, they now have some plant neighbors convinced that a conspiracy is afoot, that the wrong numbers are the right numbers and that there are secret plans to push a major sewage treatment plant expansion through.

This all brings us to Glaring Error No. 2, which took three years to discover. You’ll perhaps recall the rather outlandish price tag ($222 million) that was set in 1990 in assessing the amount of money that would be needed to improve and beautify that main Valley drag, Ventura Boulevard. Well, the city’s Department of Transportation now admits a math error that overstated the cost of the plan by some $74 million. Transportation officials blame a consultant for the error, but they concede that they didn’t catch it.

Neighbors, community leaders and businesses all deserve to have confidence in the computations on which this government relies to project everything from future sewage treatment needs to specific plans on a major San Fernando Valley thoroughfare. If that confidence has been damaged, the city has no one to blame but itself.