Sheriff’s Budget Is Not as Lean as Billed

In a law enforcement agency too poor to keep tens of thousands of criminals in jail, these are the unlikely signs of poverty:

Los Angeles County inmates sip “premium” coffee and eat chicken perhaps better suited for hotel catering. Administrators spend hundreds of thousands of dollars propping up computers they consider “expensive” and “outdated.” Sheriff Sherman Block has three Mercury Grand Marquis sedans at his disposal, including a new $27,000 model gathering dust until his others wear down.

In days of plenty, these kinds of expenses--and many others like them at the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department--might not drain the bank. But these are tough fiscal times in county government, so tough that a $373-million jail downtown has stood vacant for a year while hundreds of convicts each day walk free after serving a quarter of their sentences because of overcrowding.

Although Block has long insisted there is little fat in his $1.1-billion annual budget, a Times investigation has found many areas of spending that seem anything but lean.

Thousands of pages of financial documents and interviews with dozens of key players suggest that waste, poor planning, turf fights and alleged favoritism have placed millions of public dollars at risk.

After weeks of requests, Block refused to be interviewed about the department’s finances, referring questions to his chief fiscal officer, Fred M. Ramirez. “I don’t have time to talk about it,” the sheriff said. “I’m busy. . . . Whatever Fred tells you, I’ll back up 100%.”

Ramirez, in a series of interviews, said the department has made progress in recent years but could be doing better. “There’s got to be ways that we can cut back,” he said, acknowledging that some key areas have yet to be explored for potential savings. “We evolve slowly.”

Large chunks of the department’s budget are consumed by such big-ticket expenses as rising salaries mandated by contract and debt service on capital projects--expenses over which department leaders say they have little control. The department also says it has pared substantial sums from its budget by consolidating services, reducing overtime, cutting overhead, closing storage facilities and using more surplus goods.

But in many quarters of the department, the top priority does not always seem to be the bottom line.

How else to explain the rejection of low bids on millions of dollars worth of contracts. Or the expenditure of $125,000 every month on free meals for Sheriff’s Department employees working in the county’s seven jails. Or even the purchase of four-slice toasters in the jails at a cost of $466 each.

And the list goes on.

Such spending has occurred amid a virtual vacuum in oversight by the county’s Board of Supervisors and other public officials. County auditors say they can’t remember their last full management review of the Sheriff’s Department, and the department itself only recently created an in-house auditing team after several years without one.

In an outfit that purchases as much as the Sheriff’s Department, a price tag often has to reach six or seven figures before top officials take note.

When Ramirez was asked about the installation last year of an automated system to wash jail buses--for $132,000--he said it never happened. A few days later, he reported back that the money had indeed been spent.

“I’ll know in the future,” Ramirez said of such expenditures. “I guarantee you that.”

If there is one place you would think the Sheriff’s Department would be working extra hard to save money, it would be in its jail operation. Citing a severe cash shortage, Block has shut down three jails in recent years, creating a space crunch that has led to county inmates serving 23% of their sentences--the lowest percentage of any major jail system in the nation.

Despite the custody crisis, however, The Times found numerous examples of suspect expenditures in the jail operation, raising questions about spending practices throughout the department bureaucracy.

Each year, tens of millions of tax dollars are spent in the jails on products large and small, from $1.4 million in laundry services to $65 for mop buckets.

So much money moves through the system that even the $466 toasters--stainless-steel models praised by jail officials for their durability--are considered relatively unimportant.

“In the bigger scheme of things,” budget chief Ramirez said, “a $400 toaster is nothing.”

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The problem is that big-ticket items seem to be viewed similarly.

The Peter J. Pitchess jail complex in Castaic houses a mammoth prisoner-run bakery to supply bread and other items for the county jail system and pastries for Sheriff’s Department events. Budget analysts have estimated that by buying bread from a private vendor, the county could save as much as $800,000 a year. Sheriff’s Department custody officials have rejected the idea, saying the bakery keeps the inmates busy and out of trouble.

Nearly $1.5 million a year also is being spent on feeding the 3,200 deputies and civilian employees who work in the county’s sprawling jail system. For them, special items are provided, including roast beef and a fresh salad bar.

Deputies in Los Angeles--like jailers in some other counties--have been treated to this freebie for years, and neither the department nor contract negotiators in the county’s chief administrative office have moved to overturn the policy. Sheriff’s officials argue that it is too risky to allow jail employees to come and go for meals.

Other jails, however, have gotten around that problem by charging employees at least a nominal amount for their meals. That’s what Orange County started doing after its 1994 bankruptcy. Some critics say Los Angeles jail officials need to adopt a similar crisis mentality before it’s too late.

“With times as tough as they are, it’s just strange to see the sheriff going in and asking for more and more money [from the county], and the cow’s getting fatter and fatter,” said consultant Cindy Ogden, who represents a private security company seeking to lease county jail space. “I don’t know that they care about saving the public any money.”

Tens of thousands of dollars more are being spent from an “inmate welfare fund” in ways that have raised questions about spending priorities.

The fund has a reserve of about $6 million, plus millions more in revenues from inmates’ phone calls, food sales and other purchases they make in jail.

Although this pot is not fed directly by taxpayers, the money can be used--and has been--in ways to ease jail problems that may impact public safety. A few years ago, nearly $17 million was used to defray a jail deficit at the recommendation of the county’s chief administrative office, and just recently department officials tapped the fund for $1 million as part of a plan to finally open Twin Towers, the vacant downtown facility.

Among other things, the money is being used for inmates to watch such cable movie channels as HBO and Cinemax. In addition, sheriff’s officials who oversee the fund spent thousands of dollars last year on VCRs and film rentals, including $28,000 to a Chicago-based video firm.

“If this was a hotel, I would say it is a legitimate use of money,” said Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, when told of the uses of the inmate fund. “But it’s a prison, and we have a prison system that hasn’t been able to open its flagship facility. It just seems a bit preposterous to me that prisoners would get the kind of premium cable service that I don’t get and that most people don’t get.”

Budget chief Ramirez had this to say: “Jesus Christ, HBO?”

As for the prisoners, ex-inmate George Toliver said they aren’t complaining. Some so enjoy the movies, he said, that they have figured out ways to prolong their court cases.

“They don’t have it that good on the street,” he said. “Considering you’re in a jail situation, it ain’t that bad.”

Toliver, who was in custody for four months before his recent acquittal on charges of evading arrest, says inmates especially appreciate the “good violent movies” that are often shown, including “Casino,” with its eye-popping scene of a mobster crushing a rival’s head in a vise. The movies, department officials say, are meant to help avert jailhouse disturbances by keeping the inmates focused.

Pricey Chicken, Aged Cheddar

One of the biggest jail expenses--and one of the most controversial within the county bureaucracy--is for food. The Sheriff’s Department spends about $20 million annually feeding more than 19,000 prisoners a day--at a cost higher than at many other major jails.

One longtime vendor complained last year that Los Angeles County jail officials were demanding higher-grade poultry than he was selling to the Defense Department for U.S. troops.

Such cuts are used for “hotel catering,” not jails, wrote Jim Weston of Erlich Foods to county purchasing agents. He vowed to boycott future bids “because it’s just throwing money down the drain.”

When Weston got no response to his complaint, he said in an interview, he terminated an association with the county dating back more than 20 years.

“I got so turned off by this whole thing that I stopped competing,” he said. “It killed me to see them spending this kind of money. . . . It started gnawing away at me.”

To this day, the jails continue to serve the pricier chicken, which, according to Weston, costs twice as much as the poultry he used to sell to the department.

Block has defended the department’s purchase of more expensive “individually quick frozen” chicken legs--as opposed to meat frozen by the case--as less wasteful and more sanitary. With individual pieces, the sheriff says, kitchen staffers can more precisely measure what they need instead of having to thaw larger amounts.

Although county inmates--like those everywhere--hardly consider themselves privileged, they have seen a definite improvement in the quality of their meals since food manager Betty Starr was hired last year.

Budget chief Ramirez said he even complained to Starr that prisoners “were getting too much of a good meal.”

Starr, who has ordered more red meat and other pricey items in the jail, said in an interview that before she got the job “there wasn’t a lot of corporate knowledge” about what to serve inmates. Certain foods, she said, had been cut back, and the daily caloric intake was probably below state standards.

“I made sure that the menu was up to code,” Starr said.

But the state does not require this perk:

Last year, the department agreed to pay $861,000 for “premium blend” coffee, which its La Jolla vendor describes as “one of our highest grades.” Among other things, jail officials wanted the coffee packaged in pre-measured filter bags and shipped fresh every weekday rather than once a week. That mandate cost taxpayers an extra $232,500 above the low bidder, who was unable to make daily deliveries, according to a purchasing report.

“I don’t know if I was on drugs or what when I wrote that [requirement for daily coffee],” Starr conceded. “But as I look in retrospect I think that’s a little bit nuts.”

The jails have now returned to weekly bulk deliveries, but they are still getting premium blend.

Although some custody authorities around the country have abandoned coffee as a luxury, Los Angeles County authorities reject that approach. Said Ramirez: “If they arrested me and I was in jail . . . and they took me off coffee, I’d be a pretty grumpy Gus.”

Unlike at other jails, county officials also rejected bulk purchases of breakfast cereal in favor of more expensive single-serving boxes that they say are easier to serve. The same goes for individual boxes of juice.

And cheese? Until last year, inmates were served the more expensive “aged” variety. “It always struck me as rather foolish,” said Ron Schmer of Poppy Street Foods, a Corona firm that has sold cheese to the jails.

He estimated that the Sheriff’s Department was paying 15% more for aged cheddar. The county’s buyers, Schmer said, “didn’t seem to care.”

Bypassing Lower Bids

On paper, sheriff’s officials are supposed to work closely with the county’s primary purchasing arm, the Internal Services Department, to ensure that taxpayers get the best deals.

Records show, however, that low-bid firms were bypassed at least two dozen times in the last year on major sheriff’s contracts, twice as often as in any other county department. This translated into an extra $609,000. Sheriff’s officials say lower bidders, for the most part, could not meet the department’s special needs.

In recent months, low bids have been cast aside even more frequently because of new purchasing procedures instituted by the Sheriff’s Department that require deliveries directly to the jail. Under this system, vendors were chosen based on whether they could supply a “bundle” of different items, not just one, as in years past.

This shift was intended to avoid a 15% storage and delivery fee charged by the Internal Services Department and to reduce deliveries at the jail for security reasons. Sheriff’s officials contend that the new arrangement has cut costs at least $2 million during the last year--purchasing officials say at least some of those costs are being passed along to other departments.

What’s more, there are questions about whether the Sheriff’s Department’s new system for awarding food contracts is working.

Many smaller vendors, unable to bid on a broad array of products, are getting aced out while offering substantially cheaper prices on single items. On just three “bundles” of contracts, records show, the Sheriff’s Department is paying an estimated $695,000 above the low bids.

Salmon for the jails? The department is spending an extra $39,166, or 13.2%, above the price that was offered by the cheapest bidder, according to purchasing records.

The winning contractor for ground turkey charged an additional $85,105, or 78%, above the price offered by the cheapest bidder.

Frozen vegetables, meanwhile, went for an extra $152,000, or 19.5%, above the low bid.

In defense of the new contracting system, sheriff’s officials say security concerns dictate limiting the number of vendors with access to a jail. They also say that if all the low bidders made jail deliveries, some of the savings would be eaten up by added staffing and other costs. Still, no one knows for sure because the cost effectiveness has yet to be studied.

Purchasing agents, for their part, are leery of questioning the sheriff’s operational decisions.

“We don’t understand the security concerns well enough to know whether they are valid or not,” said Internal Services manager Chrys Varnes. “I’m not going to be responsible for someone escaping or getting hurt because of a security problem.”

Favoritism Alleged

One of the biggest beneficiaries of the new bundling process is Harvest Farms of Lancaster.

Last year, the Sheriff’s Department paid the firm $4.15 million. On one of its current contracts--to sell the jail 11 frozen food products--the company offered the lowest price on only one item. On another contract, this one to supply 15 beef, turkey and pork items, Harvest Farms offered the lowest price on fewer than half.

Although sheriff’s officials say Harvest Farms offered the best package deals, Internal Services purchasing agents suggest another explanation for the company’s success: an allegedly unfair edge over the competition.

Though not mentioned by name, Harvest Farms businessman Rick Hodgin was a focal point of an Internal Services memo written this spring that was sharply critical of the Sheriff’s Department. Hodgin has pitched products to the jails for several companies in recent years. He now works as Harvest Farms’ sales director.

The in-house memo alleged that Hodgin helped the Sheriff’s Department develop contract specifications (“often to the advantage of the firms that he represents”), received advance copies of bid documents and was treated “like an employee” with regular access to sheriff’s facilities and telephones.

“On numerous occasions the Sheriff’s Department was advised [by Internal Services] to cease this relationship,” according to the memo.

In interviews with The Times, several competing vendors echoed these allegations.

Hodgin and Harvest Farms President George Callas acknowledged in an interview that they regularly got information and gave advice on food purchases before bids were solicited. They insisted that this was usually done at the request of Internal Services, not the Sheriff’s Department. Internal Services officials denied this, saying their purchasing agents usually followed the Sheriff’s Department’s lead on what products should be bought.

Hodgin and Callas also said the access they enjoyed was no different from that accorded their competitors. “I went in there like every other vendor,” Hodgin said.

The Sheriff’s Department said it has reviewed the matter, found no evidence of wrongdoing, and continues to work with Hodgin.

“I don’t care what [Internal Services] says. . . . We didn’t have [an improper] relationship with him,” Ramirez said.

Turf Wars

The controversy over Harvest Farms comes as the Sheriff’s Department and Internal Services have developed an unusually contentious relationship, jockeying for control of purchasing power in the jails and other sheriff’s operations.

Some managers from the two departments don’t speak to one another, fueling miscommunication and finger-pointing over a wide range of contract problems, contributing to possible wastefulness.

Even the most mundane of purchases have proved troublesome--and costly. Like toilet paper.

Nearly all county government offices get the thinner and cheaper one-ply variety, Internal Services employees say, but the Sheriff’s Department was buying two-ply for inmates and staff. The department, in fact, wanted to buy $552,000 worth of two-ply paper in July, but the move was scrapped after purchasing agents complained that it was never authorized and that the thicker paper was nearly twice as expensive--assertions denied by sheriff’s officials.

That wasn’t the first time Internal Services employees alleged that sheriff’s buyers were undercutting procedures designed to ensure the best deal for taxpayers.

In a memo titled “Examples of Violations of Competitive Bid and Standard Purchasing Processes,” Internal Services agents said the Sheriff’s Department skirted policy on more than $311,000 worth of “unauthorized” purchases. It allegedly failed to seek bidders or get proper approval for everything from boat parts to what the Sheriff’s Department called an “emergency purchase” of inmate cookies at a cost of $67,000.

Sheriff’s officials blame the allegations on the bad blood with Internal Services, insisting that the rules are followed. They do acknowledge, however, that their contracting staff needs more expertise and that the department has suffered lapses.

Take, for instance, a $1.1-million radiology lab at the new Twin Towers facility, plagued by at least three different questions of possible conflicts and contracting improprieties.

First, an electrical contractor was allowed to design the lab to best suit its own X-ray equipment, giving it a distinct “unfair advantage” once it came to seek bids for that equipment, according to an Internal Services memo from September 1993. Then, Twin Towers staffers hired a consultant without proper approval and changed the specifications for the X-ray equipment while bidders were still mulling over their offers, records show.

“This obviously cast a shadow on the integrity of the ‘sealed bid process,’ ” Sheriff’s Capt. Patrick J. Mallon wrote in a memo last year. Concerned about the possibility of litigation, the Sheriff’s Department scrapped the bidding process and started anew.

Not that it mattered much.

The department says the million-dollar equipment may not be fully utilized in the near future. Although it recently came up with enough money to begin opening Twin Towers’ cells early next year, there will not be enough to open parts of the facility’s medical ward.

Many in the rank and file say that, if money is being squandered, the brass must bear some of the blame for talking tough about frugality while continuing to avail themselves of their jobs’ niceties.

“They say they don’t have any money for anything,” groused one deputy who insisted on anonymity. “You look at the [poor] working conditions for the jails, but then you go into the [sheriff’s] headquarters and see these beautifully furnished offices and marble entryways. . . . You start getting bitter.”

Block, who reportedly is the highest-paid elected official in the nation with his board-approved salary of $222,872 a year (not including his $500 annual uniform allowance), has three county cars reserved for him, records and interviews show.

A deputy drives the sheriff to and from home during the week in a 1995 Grand Marquis, using a 1990 model as a backup. The primary car had 64,000 miles at last report. Nonetheless, in June the department bought a new $27,000 Grand Marquis for Block, complete with leather seats. According to Ramirez, it remains in storage.

Block--who agreed to be interviewed about the cars but not the department’s broader financial problems--said he’s comfortable with the arrangement.

“I have a car which is my primary vehicle. And then there is, I think, a 1990 [sedan] I use . . . as a backup.” As for the new third car, Block downplayed it. “Well,” he said, “that hasn’t been assigned to me yet.”

That may happen in a month after the mileage on his current main car exceeds 70,000, Block said, adding that he doesn’t involve himself in such details. “I have people that get paid very well to take care of that.”

Although the cost of a sedan is a pittance in the sheriff’s massive budget, critics say it carries a hefty symbolic price tag--as do the 100-plus take-home cars captains and commanders receive. Theoretically, they need these vehicles to travel to after-hours emergencies. But such occurrences appear to happen only infrequently, although Ramirez said the department doesn’t track such matters.

Ramirez says deputies complain about the policy--”Dammit, why does that [supervisor] have to have a car?”--but he insists it might be cheaper than paying for mileage accumulated in personal vehicles. Besides, said Cmdr. Rachel Burgess in fiscal administration, officers “look for a job that offers the availability of a car. They like it--it’s the nature of the beast.”

The department’s financial strains also are not readily apparent in the offices of some of the department’s top brass.

An assistant sheriff’s office was decorated last year with $18,661 worth of new furniture, including a $1,685 couch, three credenzas for $1,257 each and two “Tiffany” guest chairs for $576 each, according to department purchase orders.

The items replaced a set of antique, Western-style furniture used by a retiring executive, Ramirez said. Much of the old furniture, he said, went to a sheriff’s museum.

This May, the department brass floated a plan that was too much even for the generally unquestioning Board of Supervisors. Sheriff’s officials, unsatisfied with the centralized travel planners used by other county offices, wanted to hire their own agent for $30,000 a year.

The department insisted that the idea might actually save money, but the supervisors were flabbergasted that the sheriff would ask for such an amenity.

Said one county official: “It was just a dumb idea.”

Next: Who’s watching the Sheriff’s Department’s money?

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‘Emergency’ Cookies

When the inmate-run bakery at the Pitchess jails couldn’t turn out cookies earlier this year because of apparent security concerns, Sheriff’s Department officials sought a $200,000 “emergency purchase” of the items for inmate lunches. County purchasing agents blocked the order because they said it had not been properly put out to bid--but not before sheriff’s officials had bought $67,000 in Keebler chocolate chip, oatmeal and sugar cookies, according to records.