Council Delays Bond Measure on Police Facilities, Orders Study

Saying there is too little information to present to voters, the Los Angeles City Council on Tuesday delayed until 1998 a proposed $200-million bond measure for police facilities.

Instead, the council voted to spend $100,000 to hire a consultant who will examine replacing Parker Center, the Los Angeles Police Department’s downtown headquarters.

The 9-3 council vote followed a heated debate in which lawmakers questioned police officers’ ability to continue working in cramped, dilapidated offices and criticized the continued spending on studies by the consultant, Kosmont & Associates. Larry Kosmont, who conducted the original study, has collected nearly $1 million in city contracts.

“The situation now is absolutely intolerable,” complained Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg, who voted against the delay, along with council members Mike Hernandez and Nate Holden. “I’m asking, not rhetorically, what do we do in the next two years?”

Council members Richard Alatorre and Laura Chick, who chair the budget and public safety committees and sponsored the motion to delay the bond measure and order an additional study, acknowledged that they have no plans for addressing the facilities problems immediately. But they said it would be impossible to build the necessary political support to get the required two-thirds approval of a bond measure this spring.