Attorney Enters Race Against Garcetti

Barry C. Groveman, a lawyer who played a leading role in the replacement of Los Angeles Unified School District Supt. Ruben Zacarias, kicked off his run against Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti on Wednesday, charging that the incumbent has built “a legacy of failure and neglect.”

The second candidate to announce a challenge to Garcetti in the March 7, 2000, primary election, Groveman said that if he is elected he will direct the district attorney’s office toward a new emphasis on prosecuting child abuse cases and public corruption.

Before delivering his announcement speech to reporters gathered at a Koreatown hotel, Groveman, a Calabasas resident, introduced his wife, Susan, and son, Brandon, planting a kiss on the 4-year-old’s cheek. He then charged that the district attorney has not aggressively prosecuted alleged child abusers, and that such cases should not be “the sole province of social workers, family lawyers and dependency court judges.”

Groveman also vowed to fight fraud and influence peddling on large public projects, saying that taxpayers “have a right to expect that money dedicated to public transportation, desperately needed schools or welfare will be spent properly.”

Groveman said that in his work as a paid legal advisor to the school district, he has been a whistle-blower.

An environmental defense lawyer who has been retained by the school district for 10 years, Groveman heads a district task force investigating toxic hazards at school sites. Groveman has been a vocal critic of efforts to build schools on contaminated sites, including the proposed Belmont Learning Complex.

As head of the district’s school safety team, Groveman pushed the school board to bring in former board member Howard Miller as chief executive, setting forth the chain of events leading to the replacement of Zacarias.

Along with Groveman, 46, veteran prosecutor Steve Cooley, 52, is seeking to unseat Garcetti.

A career prosecutor, Garcetti was first elected in 1992. Weakened by his office’s failure to win a guilty verdict in the O.J. Simpson murder trial, Garcetti was nearly beaten by Deputy Dist. Atty. John Lynch, who lost by a margin of 5,000 votes out of more than 2.2 million cast.

Groveman, who has been in private practice since 1986, began his legal career in the Los Angeles city attorney’s office in 1979. A graduate of Southwestern University Law School, Groveman also was a special assistant to Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner from 1984 to 1986.

Groveman is a partner in the Century City office of Proskauer, Rose, a New York corporate law firm.

Groveman said that as an outsider to the district attorney’s office, he is free of a bureaucratic resistance to change that he says afflicts Garcetti and Cooley, who each have spent about 30 years in the office.

Groveman’s challengers are highlighting his outsider status, but say it is evidence of Groveman’s inexperience. “He misses the point,” Cooley said. “A good public prosecutor has got to know what he is doing, and he doesn’t know what he is doing.”

Cooley criticized Groveman’s pledge to meet with police and social workers to discuss child abuse. “He wants to have a task force. If you know what you’re doing, you come up with solutions yourself,” Cooley said.

Cooley, who headed the district attorney’s welfare fraud unit, said Groveman “would not know how to tackle a public corruption case if it came up and bit him in the behind.”

Garcetti campaign spokesman Bill Carrick attacked Groveman’s campaign focus. “It looks to me like it’s all poll-driven. It rang as phony to me,” he said of Groveman’s decision to emphasize child abuse.

Carrick also questioned the degree to which Groveman is an outsider to big government. “He’s been working for the school district, which is the most entrenched bureaucracy in the county. He’s a very plugged-in insider,” he said.