Courthouse Project Fails to Produce a Courtroom

Over the past 10 years, Los Angeles County’s Master Courthouse Construction Program has spent almost $80 million without adding a single new courtroom to one of the nation’s most congested criminal and civil justice systems.

The crippling shortage of courtroom space, according to interviews and county documents, continues to force civil litigants to prowl the freeways in pursuit of justice and pressures prosecutors to strike plea bargains with accused criminals just to get the cases off crowded dockets.

In fact, after almost a decade of planning and spending, all the county has to show for its money is a few parcels of vacant land, drawers full of design and architectural drawings so old that they all have become virtually obsolete, and a single unfinished courthouse north of Inglewood that is at least 12 months from completion.

“Because of a lack of facilities,” Superior Court Presiding Judge Robert W. Parkin said Tuesday, “there are some injustices. And there are a lot of people who have to drive 70 miles each way [to court] just to have cases tried, and the same is true in criminal cases.”

Divorces, child custody battles and other Family Court matters drag on for years, Parkin said. And courts throughout the county are relying on early disposition programs, striking plea bargains with criminals “so we can rid of cases early on,” Parkin said.

“I think it is is a direct result of overcrowding,” he said. “There is no question.”

On Tuesday, the county Board of Supervisors took a small step toward alleviating the crisis. On a 3-2 vote, the board ended a rancorous legal battle over its long-stalled Chatsworth courthouse, agreeing to pay its disgruntled developer, Alexander Haagen Co. Inc., a $4.6-million cash settlement and allowing the firm to proceed with construction. However, the courthouse may not be completed for years, and its estimated final cost has soared to $97 million, more than twice the original estimate.

Settlement of the Chatsworth impasse is but a first step in the board’s attempt to write some sort of conclusion to what is emerging as the most recent chapter in the county’s tangled history of administrative chaos and fiscal mismanagement.

New courthouses still are planned in Lancaster, the South Bay, North Hollywood, Santa Monica, Pasadena, southeast Los Angeles County and Long Beach. But officials of the cash-strapped county now concede that some of them will never be built, while construction of others--such as the desperately needed Lancaster courthouse--may not begin for decades.

Even so, the $80 million that the county has spent will be dwarfed by the projected cost overruns on the courthouses that eventually will be built. Some of them, documents show, are now projected to cost $100 million apiece.

Many of the overruns, according to county documents and interviews, are the result of years of poor planning, mismanagement and lax oversight by county officials.

“A lot of spending has been done, and we really have nothing to show for it,” Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky said Tuesday, later admitting he had no idea how much money had been spent. “And that is a problem that we have to get our hands around.”

But doing so seems certain to engender more controversy. Supervisor Mike Antonovich insists that his Antelope Valley constituents need courtrooms much more than residents of the San Fernando Valley, and the board has voted in the past to make that courthouse its top priority after Chatsworth and Inglewood.

But even that seems uncertain.

Supervisor Gloria Molina--who joined Antonovich in opposing the Chatsworth settlement--says that her Eastside district also desperately needs additional courts. Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke says her South Los Angeles district is in dire need of courthouse space too.

Yaroslavsky, however, insists there is “is enough money in the [courthouse] fund to build Chatsworth. But there is not enough money to build Chatsworth and anything else.”

Even when Chatsworth is built, its 10 courtrooms would not provide any net gain because it would replace temporary facilities now housed in trailers and other places.

The board’s newest member, Don Knabe, noted the relationship between the funds spent to date and the uncomfortable situation in which the board now finds itself.

“I think the whole courthouse construction program could have been handled a lot better,” Knabe said. “Now everyone is scrambling to take care of their own.”

The county’s chief administrative officer, David Janssen, acknowledges that “clearly, there were problems in the way the county was handling capital [courthouse] projects. The county was not doing a very good job.”

But Janssen denied that significant funds were misspent, saying that as much as half of the $80 million went for land, “which has value”--regardless of whether the county builds courthouses on it.

Janssen blames some of the mess on management problems that he says were corrected two years ago, when the supervisors took the courthouse expansion project away from the county’s troubled Internal Services Department and assigned it to the Department of Public Works. Janssen’s own finance and contract specialists now oversee the fiscal details of the courthouse expansion effort, he said.

“I don’t think they had any [central control] before that,” Janssen said. “Everyone was sort of on their own. Now it’s been centralized.”

Such management problems were compounded by factors that were outside the county’s control.

When the state took for itself the fines and forfeiture revenues that cities had relied upon to help it pay for statewide trial court funding in the early 1990s, local governments no longer had any incentive to levy parking tickets and court fines that provided much of the courthouse funding, Janssen said.

Thus, courthouse construction expenditures by the county fell from $25 million in 1989 to $16 million in 1993 and then petered out almost completely.

Then the recession hit. The courthouses were ordered during the boom times of the mid- to late 1980s, and by the time the supervisors voted to put the expansion effort on hold, they had already spent $40 million--much of it on designs and plans.

The supervisors agreed at the time to go forward with the so-called airport courthouse with its 12 courtrooms and the Chatsworth facility because most of the money had been spent on them.

A week later, the Northridge earthquake struck. That disaster put most capital projects on hold, and then, when state legislators strengthened seismic and building codes in its aftermath, the county was forced to modify all of its plans for the courthouses.

But during the same period, management problems appeared to worsen, according to the county’s documents.

To date, the county has spent tens of millions of dollars on design work and architectural and engineering plans that it will never use--in some cases because its own contract administrators kept changing their minds and asking for one set of changes after another.

In Haagen’s case, the $4.6-million payoff was approved Tuesday as a way of settling his $12.8-million legal claim.

Haagen and his development team allege in legal documents that the county forced him to make literally thousands of “unanticipated additional” changes to the courthouse, resulting in long delays and huge cost overruns.

Haagen’s team also “confronted numerous problems and difficulties with the county project staff, which seemed to continually undermine, delay and frustrate development of the project,” one legal memo says.

Urging the settlement Tuesday, county public works Director Harry Stone said flatly: “We recognize there is legitimacy to the claims [Haagen has] made.”

Similar problems have led to lawsuits, delays and enormous cost overruns in the building of the Antelope Valley courthouse.

According to architect Peter Kudrave, lax oversight by county officials allowed judges, prosecutors and everyone else who planned to work in the vast courthouse to come to him with design changes, making it impossible for him to complete his work or remain within his budget.

“They made hundreds and hundreds of changes, delayed the project’s design on at least five separate occasions and required four different, incomplete and incompatible and unbuildable architectural designs that [eventually] became outdated,” Kudrave said.

Kudrave, who sued the county for unrecovered costs, estimates that the county threw away more than $13 million on unusable design plans on the Lancaster courthouse.

Overall, he said, “they grossly mismanaged the entire program, in the process spending more than $81 million on eight separate courthouse projects, and they don’t even have a door handle to show for it.”

Kudrave said the county’s mishandling of the Antelope Valley project almost put him out of business, forced him to lay off his entire staff, and cost him and his firm more than $3.5 million that the county still owes.

A judge threw out Kudrave’s lawsuit, saying that he has no grounds to sue because he was only a subcontractor to a developer. He is appealing that decision.

Meanwhile, Kudrave took his complaints to Assemblyman George Runner (R-Lancaster) after county officials said they couldn’t help him.

Runner has grown so disgusted by the lack of available courtroom space in his district that he persuaded the Legislature to order a full-blown audit of the county’s construction budget.

“Over $10 million was spent on a courthouse out here [in Lancaster] without a working set of plans yet,” Runner said. “I just think it is outrageous.”