Waste in Court Project Assailed

Poor planning and mismanagement caused Los Angeles County to waste $18.6 million on an ill-conceived courthouse construction boom, a state audit released Tuesday concluded, adding that potentially millions more dollars were squandered because county officials ignored the warning of an outside consulting firm that cautioned against building so many courtrooms.

“The county ended up making some real poor decisions and wasting millions of dollars in pursuit of this overly ambitious plan” to build courthouses throughout Los Angeles, said the author of the report, state Auditor Kurt R. Sjoberg, in an interview. “Clearly from the perspective of planning and design . . . we consider the funds to be wasted.”

The audit confirmed earlier reports that the county spent $79 million on eight courthouses it has never completed, and it added new details about how breakdowns in the county’s management of the courthouse construction effort contributed to the waste, cost overruns and years of delay.

It also disclosed that the consultant--First Boston Corp.--warned the county in 1991 that it could not afford to proceed with its ambitious effort to build the courthouses in one of the nation’s most congested criminal and civil justice systems.

But auditors said the county proceeded full speed ahead in the early 1990s, spending $9.9 million on plans and designs that were never used. It also spent $8.7 million to acquire land for five courthouses that auditors said “have scant chance of being built.”

“Had the county reacted promptly to the consultant’s warning, it could have prevented spending” not only of that money, but potentially other large amounts of cash on other aspects of the courthouse expansion effort, auditors said.

The county put the entire effort on hold in 1994, saying that it had no money to continue.

But in recent years, it has proceeded slowly with two municipal courthouses, one near Los Angeles International Airport and the other in Chatsworth. And just last month, the supervisors approved spending $5.2 million to resume plans for another courthouse in the Antelope Valley.

Seven others have been postponed indefinitely. They are in North Hollywood, West Los Angeles, the South Bay, Pasadena, Santa Monica, Long Beach and Huntington Park.

Because of the delays--nearly all of the courthouses were scheduled to be completed by 1993--the projected cost of building those facilities has soared to as much as $100 million apiece.

Sjoberg and his staff said they believed none of those courthouses would be built “in the foreseeable future.”

And even if they were, all of the architectural plans, engineering reports and environmental impact studies “will be outmoded, and of no value” and would have to be redone, Sjoberg said.

According to the audit, the county made a host of mistakes, both general and specific, when it began the courthouse construction effort in 1988.

Auditors also found that:

* The county erred from the outset when it projected how much courthouse construction revenue it would generate from traffic fines and tickets. And it did not lower those expectations even after a change in state law in 1991 caused a huge decrease in the amount of revenue it could expect.

* The county’s cost projections were far too low, leaving it with not enough money to build courthouses it had already designed. And management problems compounded the escalating costs as the county at times paid for several sets of architectural plans for the same project.

* The county also failed to prioritize the projects based on any kind of formal needs assessments, and therefore failed to “ensure that the limited funds were spent where the needs were greatest.”

In a formal response to the audit, county officials generally agreed with the findings and recommendations. On Tuesday, Chief Administrative Officer David Janssen said that all of the problems noted by the auditors have been corrected over the last three years, and that the county did successfully build many other courthouses before 1994.

But critics, including Assemblyman George Runner (R-Lancaster), said Tuesday that the audit confirmed their fears that the county erred on one of its most important missions--providing its constituents with access to the judicial system.

There are so few courtrooms in the north part of the county, Runner said, that residents often must drive to Los Angeles just to get civil cases heard.

“It troubles me the amount of dollars that were wasted with an unrealistic view of the future,” Runner said. He called for the audit last year after learning that millions had been spent on plans for the Antelope Valley courthouse.

Runner also criticized the county supervisors for what he said was a lack of political will in standing up to one another--and to state lawmakers--in deciding where to build courtrooms.

“They were not willing to make those hard decisions in the past, and instead moved forward blindly in an effort not to offend anybody,” Runner said. “It obviously set up a system that was unrealistic in meeting the courthouse demands.”

In the audit, Sjoberg’s staff called on the county to begin a wholesale reassessment of the entire courthouse construction program, to see where courthouses are needed the most.

Runner said he feared that proposal “will start a new fight of reprioritizing” among the supervisors and state lawmakers over which courthouses to build next.

Janssen disagreed, saying that Gov. Pete Wilson recently created a statewide task force that will assess the need for more courtroom space statewide. That group will then decide where to allocate money instead of allowing the state’s 58 counties to do it independently.