County’s Use of Cellular Phones Burgeoning

The number of cellular telephones has more than tripled among Ventura County government employees in the past four years, costing taxpayers $334,000 during the last year, according to the county auditor.

Citing a potential for fraud and abuse, a citizen activist plans to raise questions about the county’s 523 cell phones and their ballooning bills at today’s meeting of Ventura County supervisors.

“I’m prepared to present these figures to the Board of Supervisors and then take it over to the grand jury,” said Don Hollingsworth, a retired airline pilot and critic of government spending. “There are probably a lot of personal calls and calls to 900 numbers and everything else,” he said.

But county officials said they are unaware of any abuse and that each department requires employees to reimburse the county for personal calls.

Furthermore, they said, most of the cellular phones are being used by law enforcement and public safety officials who rely on them to catch criminals and save lives.

“They are absolutely essential,” said Sheriff Larry Carpenter, whose department has 194 cellular phones, more than any other county agency.

Narcotics officers have long used cell phones, Carpenter said. But now car telephones and portable phones are made available to other deputies as more criminals have taken to monitoring police radio bands.

On Sunday, he said, deputies arrested an elusive ring of avocado rustlers, aided by switching to cell phones on the stakeout. He said the thieves had been eavesdropping on police scanners to determine which orchards to strike.

County Fire Chief James E. Sewell said firefighters have found cell phones invaluable at the scenes of disasters and other emergencies, particularly when the regular radio channels are clogged with chatter.

“It is not just a convenience thing,” said Sewell, whose department has 38 cell phones.

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George Mathews, director of the county’s Information Systems Department, said the number of cell phones rose sharply after the Northridge earthquake and the massive mudslide that wiped out homes in the seaside community of La Conchita.

“A lot of it has to do with radio coverage and dead zones in their coverage,” said Mathews, whose department maintains the county’s telephones and system of microwave relays. “Law enforcement folks use the cell phones as a complement to their radio systems.”

Mathews was in charge of cellular bills until last year. “When we monitored them, there was no abuse,” Mathews said.

Now, the duties have fallen to county Auditor-Controller Thomas O. Mahon.

“Nobody has come to us with any indication of abuse,” Mahon said Monday. “Frankly, there has not been that much interest in phones or phone bills. . . . I’m a little bit short on auditors and there are a whole lot of other things we are wrestling with.”

For now, each county agency is responsible for looking over its cellular telephone bills for personal calls or other abuses, he said.

Carpenter said his department has taken steps to control the potential for such problems. For instance, he said, car phones installed in cruisers that patrol the unincorporated areas of the county are restricted to calling 911, the watch commander, or department records.

All Sheriff’s Department employees who are assigned their own cellular phones must reimburse the county for personal calls.

“We don’t tell people that they can’t use them for personal calls,” Carpenter said. “At the end of the billing cycle, we tell them to go through their bills and pay for their calls. They write checks.”

The sheriff’s, fire and other departments say they scrutinize employee bills for signs of personal or inappropriate calls.

“We monitor the bills very closely,” Chief Deputy Richard Rodriguez said. “Most of them tend to be routine.”

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In addition to the sheriff’s and fire departments, other large cellular phone operators include the district attorney’s office, with 49 cell phones; the county Corrections Services Agency, 46 phones; and county Mental Health Services, 27 cell phones.

The remaining phones are scattered widely across the bureaucracy, including among county supervisors, who are billed for eight of them.

That’s double the number of 1992. That was the year county officials put out a report on portable phones while reviewing supervisors’ perquisites. At the time, the county had 161 portable phones.

Supervisor John K. Flynn said he turned in his cell phone years ago, after realizing he had a tendency to overuse it. Two years ago, he proposed tightening up cellular use to help trim the budget.

“When you figure that we need some money for the libraries, we ought to get some money out of the cell phones,” Flynn said. “I think we need a stricter policy on who uses cell phones and how they use them.”