Official Defends Parole Office Move

As politicians, community activists and police continued to blast the relocation of a parole office from Sherman Oaks to the same North Hollywood block recovering from last week’s shootout, a state parole official said Thursday the critics were off target.

About 30 protesters, led by City Councilmen Richard Alarcon and Joel Wachs, met at the office on Laurel Canyon Boulevard a few doors north of the Bank of America still marked by last Friday’s gun battle. They said state officials “snuck in” on Monday, opening the San Fernando Valley’s only parole office--and therefore, they say, attracting criminals to the area--as residents were still coping with the shooting’s aftermath.

“We were invaded last Friday by criminals. Now we have been invaded by the state,” Alarcon said.

But Levan Bell, an administrator for the state Department of Corrections who oversees the seven parole centers in Los Angeles County, vehemently rebutted protesters’ charges that the office would increase neighborhood crime.

“The center is not a location where we allow our parolees to hang out,” he said. “Besides, the bulk of our work takes place in the community, not at the office.”

From 1983 to 1994, the office was in the same North Hollywood complex where it reopened Monday, Bell said. Needing more space and amenities, it moved for three years to 5121 Van Nuys Blvd. in Sherman Oaks before being lured back by more room at the old address.

Bell disputed a $2.5-million figure given by Alarcon and Wachs as the value of the Sherman Oaks lease signed by the state--and therefore the amount of “government money down the drain,” in the words of an Alarcon aide. Bell maintained that moving the office to Sherman Oaks required about $530,000 in renovation costs.

Bell called the timing of the move a coincidence, adding that lease terms were finalized in November and the move had been scheduled “way before” the shooting.

“Had we had any idea, we never would have based our schedule around that,” he said.