Sheriff Has Virtually Free Rein Over Agency Spending

As Los Angeles County Sheriff Sherman Block and his entourage strode toward the dais to discuss his billion-dollar budget with the Board of Supervisors this summer, the panel’s chairman suggested a new title for the august lawman.

“Maybe we should call you ‘Your Eminence,’ ” Supervisor Mike Antonovich said with a smile.

It was meant as a lighthearted homage to the popular Los Angeles sheriff, one of only three men to hold the job since the Depression. But the remark also spoke volumes about Block’s unmatched power in the county’s insular political culture--a reality not lost on those who are supposed to be keeping an eye on his department.

In fact, the sheriff is treated like royalty--seldom challenged, constantly courted.

A fierce protector of his realm, Block is allowed to run one of the nation’s largest law enforcement agencies with virtually no budgetary oversight from the Board of Supervisors or from auditors skilled in finding wastefulness.

“Every elected official, including the president of the United States and a county supervisor, has to disclose how they spend their money, and you don’t have to go on a wild goose chase to find it,” said Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, the board’s newest member. “The same level of fiscal scrutiny does not exist with the sheriff.”

But even Yaroslavsky, who has been Block’s sharpest critic on the board, knows the political score. The supervisor recently asked the sheriff to attend a fund-raiser and personally present him with a plaque Yaroslavsky won during Block’s charity golf tournament.

“It’s nice to have the sheriff supporting you,” Yaroslavsky said. “It’s much better to have it than not to have it.”

The sheriff, who declined to be interviewed for this article, has steadfastly maintained that he oversees the leanest law enforcement shop around--despite large sums in questionable expenses uncovered in a Times investigation.

As an elected official, Block insists that state and local laws give him the right to operate with fiscal autonomy or, as his budget chief says, without other county officials and reporters “snooping around our daily business.”

“Yeah, we’re suspicious--there’s no doubt about it,” said the sheriff’s finance director, Fred M. Ramirez. “It’s normal in any bureaucracy. [The reaction is:] Why are you coming and looking at us?”

Outsiders, Ramirez said, do not know enough to meddle in the business of running such a large and varied law enforcement agency. “I’m not sure you can do that from an ivory tower at 500 West Temple” (home to the supervisors’ offices), Ramirez said.

For now, he needn’t worry.

The reality is that the supervisors have long treated Block with kid gloves, recoiling from one potential fiscal showdown after the next. Consider the fiasco surrounding the Twin Towers Correctional Facility:

For more than a year, the $373-million jail has stood empty on the northeastern outskirts of downtown while tens of thousands of county inmates at other facilities have been freed because of severe overcrowding after serving less time than in any other major jail system in the country.

Block insisted for months that there was no money in his budget to operate the place. When supervisors considered directing him and other department heads to trim their budgets to help underwrite Twin Towers, a defiant Block warned the board that he would have to yank nearly 400 deputies off the streets of their districts to find $14 million.

The supervisors backed off, but public pressure mounted, forcing the sheriff’s hand. Suddenly, amid much fanfare, he announced before the board in September that he had found $25 million in savings and $37 million in outside sources of revenue to open the state-of-the-art facility.

The supervisors did not grill the sheriff about why he hadn’t been able to come up with the money sooner. Instead, they congratulated him.

Who’s Keeping Track?

Although the supervisors occasionally do complain that they know too little about the Sheriff’s Department’s mammoth budget, they seldom have taken the initiative to closely track the money they have given him, the largest chunk of county tax revenues the board doles out each year.

Many large law enforcement agencies, such as the Los Angeles Police Department, are overseen by standing independent police commissions and inspectors general. But not the Sheriff’s Department. And at no time in recent memory have the supervisors dispatched their own auditors--or specialized consultants from the private sector--to undertake any kind of comprehensive review of the sheriff’s books.

Some experts say such efficiency studies could identify a combination of savings and new revenue sources amounting to 5% or even 10% of Block’s $1.1-billion budget.

“You are talking tremendous amounts of money, and somebody should be on top of that,” said veteran auditor Roger Mialocq, vice president of the Harvey Rose Accountancy firm, which has found millions of dollars in potential savings at other California sheriff’s departments.

Elected supervisors of other major counties, such as San Diego and Santa Clara, have actively overseen the budgets of their sheriff’s departments, resulting in proposed reforms and potentially huge savings.

In 1993, Harvey Rose Accountancy conducted a sweeping performance evaluation of the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department. In a 250-page report, the auditors recommended dozens of improvements that they said would shave $13 million off the department’s budget.

Even before that, San Diego County had consolidated all its jailhouse kitchens at the recommendation of auditors. Now--as in many other urban jail systems, but not Los Angeles’--San Diego ships precooked meals to inmates at an estimated savings of 15% of the food budget.

“You need separate and independent people making sure that fiscal and management controls are in place,” said Mialocq, whose San Francisco firm also works for the Los Angeles County Grand Jury. “Otherwise, things start going to hell. . . . It is a plan for failure.”

For the most part, Los Angeles County supervisors say they depend on specially designated aides on their staffs to act as watchdogs, keeping them informed of financial and operational matters in the Sheriff’s Department. Supervisor Deane Dana, for one, says his criminal justice aide, Debbie Crawford, is as good as they get.

What Dana hasn’t disclosed publicly is that Crawford has been on the Sheriff’s Department payroll since February as a financial analyst.

After Crawford landed the higher-paying Sheriff’s Department job, Dana said, he asked Block if she could stay on until the supervisor’s December retirement. They struck a deal in which Crawford would remain on Dana’s staff but continue to get paid by the sheriff.

The arrangement continued until July 1, the start of the new fiscal year, when Dana’s office started reimbursing the sheriff for Crawford’s $63,528 annual salary. This means that for more than four months Crawford was pocketing a paycheck from the agency she was supposed to be monitoring.

Neither Crawford nor her boss sees any problem with the unusual arrangement.

“My ability to be objective and provide the best information possible for Supervisor Dana has not changed,” Crawford said.

Others see it differently.

“It just shows that [Block’s] tentacles are everywhere,” said one county budget expert, who requested anonymity. “It certainly compromises her objectivity.”

Whatever its propriety, the arrangement vividly underscores the often incestuous ties between the sheriff and county supervisors--ties that raise questions about the board’s ability to stand nose to nose with Block, not just shoulder to shoulder.

The Politics of Power

Much of Block’s power flows from a potent combination of vaguely worded statutes on the breadth of his budgetary independence and, perhaps more important, his intimidating political influence.

It’s no secret that an endorsement from the sheriff is one of the most coveted in local politics.

Renowned for his folksy and avuncular demeanor, Block enjoys enormous support among the millions of voters who return him to office in overwhelming majorities.

While providing law enforcement for unincorporated areas and 39 independent cities throughout the county, Block has forged a political base of support that makes him all but impervious to challenges from election opponents. The 72-year-old grandfather, who has been sheriff for 14 years, has told his top command staff that he plans to run again in 1998.

Although the sheriff may seem mild-mannered, he understands his clout and is willing to throw a few punches.

During the county’s fiscal near-meltdown last year, Block sued the board over proposed budget cuts to his department, litigation the sheriff dropped when the supervisors gave him an additional $42 million.

And then there are Block’s phone calls to top county officials.

“We have a saying around here: ‘This is the angriest the sheriff has ever been,’ ” said one supervisor’s chief deputy about Block’s phone conversations. “He’s not shy about that.”

Like every other local elected official, the supervisors don’t need a pollster to advise them that it’s smart to be Block’s friend--or to at least appear so to voters.

To that end, the supervisors--liberal and conservative alike--politely request the services of the Republican sheriff in their campaigns.

Don Knabe, Dana’s chief deputy who is running for his boss’ seat in the largely conservative district that sweeps across the southern part of the county, has gone so far as to use Block’s photo instead of his own on the cover of a campaign mailer.

Liberal Gloria Molina had Block as a chairman of her fund-raising dinner at the Biltmore Hotel last year, according to her staff. He also emceed the event.

Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke summed up the prevailing attitude: “I don’t think anybody wants to get a reputation as being anti-sheriff in their district. [Supervisors] want to show they are supportive . . . of eliminating crime.”

The danger in all this political back-scratching, according to government watchdogs, is that it undermines aggressive oversight.

“It is the role of the Board of Supervisors to know how the Sheriff’s Department is spending its money, especially when money is extraordinarily tight, as it is in L.A. County,” said Ruth Holton, executive director of California Common Cause. “Just because you have a cozy relationship with the Board of Supervisors should not make you immune to scrutiny. In fact, it is all the more reason there is a need for scrutiny.”

Most of the supervisors, however, seem reluctant to subscribe fully to that notion--as Sally Reed can attest.

Hitting a Roadblock

When Reed was still the county’s top fiscal official last year, she proposed splitting Block’s budget into five pieces so the board could see how much was being spent on patrol, detectives, administration, custody and court services. Transfers among those accounts would require approval of the supervisors.

Predictably, the board rejected the plan.

“During the 2 1/2 years I was there, my staff and I worked hard in trying to develop more information on the Sheriff’s Department because it was needed, and it was difficult to do,” said Reed, who left the county in May to head the state Department of Motor Vehicles. “Frankly, in the end, the board supported his prerogative to manage the department as he saw fit.”

Despite Reed’s failure, Supervisor Yaroslavsky took another run at the proposal last summer but couldn’t even get the board to vote on it. “I’m just not willing to be part of the dumping on the sheriff,” Molina said during the board’s discussion. She declined to be interviewed for this story.

The supervisors recently adopted a much watered-down version of the plan, simply pledging to ask for more information from all county departments--but not the details or control that Reed and Yaroslavsky had wanted.

Describing himself as “frustrated and infuriated,” Yaroslavsky said in an interview that he wants “access to how the taxpayers’ dollars are being spent. If you don’t have accountability, the system can run amok.”

The supervisor complained that while his colleagues routinely question other county departments about relatively small budget items, they “try to muzzle me when I’m trying to ask a hundred-million-dollar question” about the Sheriff’s Department.

“I’m a minority of one right now,” Yaroslavsky said.

In fact, the supervisor’s colleagues have delved so rarely into the sheriff’s financial affairs that they say they are unsure of their authority beyond approving the department’s lump-sum budget and signing off on certain contracts and purchases.

“I don’t think we have a total handle on where he is spending his money,” Supervisor Burke acknowledged.

Many county officials say Block is treated to a different standard than Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti, who also is an elected official and covered by virtually the same budgetary statutes as the sheriff.

The board, county officials say, has questioned Garcetti far more aggressively about his agency’s spending. What’s more, officials say, Garcetti’s staff is more forthcoming with details of his budget, which is about one-fourth the size of Block’s.

County Auditor-Controller Al Sasaki said he would like to do comprehensive audits of all large county agencies every three years, including the Sheriff’s Department. But, he said, “with the [budget] cuts we have taken, we don’t have the resources to go in there.”

And when it comes to the Sheriff’s Department, Sasaki said, there’s another problem. Block, according to the auditor, “says we can’t tell him how to spend his money.”

County auditors many years ago did try to examine one Sheriff’s Department operation--the vast system of transporting inmates from jails to courthouses. But the effort was abandoned, sources say, because they could not get the kind of cooperation necessary for a thorough review.

One top-ranking county official said such behavior inevitably prompts suspicions.

“Do I think someone who won’t open their budget to the public or the supervisors has something to hide? Yes. Especially when they fight something like splitting the budget into five pieces,” said the official, who requested anonymity. “They are experts at investigative work--and at concealing information.”

Sheriff’s budget director Ramirez scoffs at speculation that the department is hiding money or stonewalling supervisors and others seeking information.

“If [county officials are] not getting what they need, then they’re not asking,” Ramirez said. “Those documents are available for anybody to misinterpret.”

Ramirez does acknowledge that the Sheriff’s Department could be doing a better job of policing its spending.

The department does not, for example, conduct comprehensive in-house reviews of its spending and fiscal management practices. Ramirez says he only recently tapped four staffers as auditors after several years of doing without them.

Moreover, although the department has cut several million dollars in overtime costs in recent years, Ramirez said there are other broad areas of potential savings where he has not looked, such as letting contracts for goods and services.

“I really need someone who knows how to do it,” Ramirez said, adding: “We have got to change.”

The state of California may have a few suggestions.

As part of the fiscal bailout of Los Angeles County, state auditors have spent the past few months looking at the sheriff’s finances. Like others before them, they encountered some initial resistance from sheriff’s officials, according to sources.

The auditors, who subsequently received more cooperation, are expected to recommend that Block replace some highly paid personnel with less-trained, lower-paid civilians in jobs where sworn officers are not needed--a move Block says he is already making.

Supervisors Balk

Given the embarrassing Twin Towers affair, some of the supervisors seem more willing these days to help find cuts too. Even staunch Sheriff’s Department supporter Antonovich conceded: “We’ve got to have additional oversight.”

Theoretically, the supervisors are required to approve certain contracts for goods and services exceeding $100,000. In the past, board members would routinely rubber-stamp all those that the sheriff recommended for approval.

But in a rare occurrence several months ago, they balked. The resulting debate revealed the kind of inattention the department seems to be paying to the bottom line--and how taxpayers can benefit from a few well-targeted inquiries by the supervisors.

At question was a request by the sheriff to extend--without competitive bidding--the contract of a company that was paid $1.4 million last year to launder jail garments. The board ordered that the lucrative contract be put up for bid.

When forced to compete, the company that had monopolized the contract for nearly a decade slashed its price to $710,000--about half of what it charged the county the prior year. A second bidder came in even lower at $610,000.

Even then, the Sheriff’s Department recommended that the contract go to the higher-priced company, citing the department’s “comfort level” and the firm’s quality, reliability and security. The board, however, wasn’t buying it and overruled the department.

Antonovich, who led the charge, sarcastically remarked that, for “all the millions” the laundry company had earlier charged, it should provide its services “for free.” Molina said the deal smelled “fishy.”

“It looks,” she said, “like the sheriff just wanted to do business as usual.”