$800 Million Spent by State and Local Agencies on Y2K

While the Y2K bug failed to bite and civil unrest didn’t erupt, such millennium worries cost California’s biggest cities and the state more than $800 million for computer fixes and millions more to put extra police on the street New Year’s Eve.

The state spent $384 million to debug its vast network of computers to prevent the long-predicted digital meltdown, and the city and county of Los Angeles rang up $260 million in repairs.

Long Beach spent $15 million, San Jose $11 million and San Francisco $9.5 million to beat anticipated computer glitches as the calendar rolled over to the year 2000. Orange County, meanwhile, paid $18 million and Contra Costa County about $20 million. Santa Clara County, home of the Silicon Valley, shelled out $35 million.

Amid grumbles in some quarters that the Y2K threat was vastly overblown, state and municipal leaders defended the spending, saying that it helped avert certain calamity in an age when nearly every aspect of life is touched by computers. Much of the work, they said, consisted of upgrades that eventually would be needed anyway.

“I’ve had people walk up in the grocery store and tell me what a bunch of hokum Y2K turned out to be,” said Steve Steinbrecher, Contra Costa County’s chief information officer. “You can look at it that way, but I think the real reason Y2K was such a nonevent was because a lot of good people did a hell of a lot of hard work.”

Public safety officials expressed similar sentiments. Amid worries about terrorism, police departments up and down the state doubled the number of uniformed officers on duty. The result was one of the quietest New Year’s Eves in memory.

Though several departments said they shifted work schedules to boost the number of officers and avoid added costs, many ended up footing big bills for overtime pay.

The Los Angeles Police Department put 2,400 officers on the streets, three times normal. But department officials said they had not yet calculated the cost. In addition, the city set aside $827,000 to pay for transportation workers, technology experts and others who might be needed to grapple with any municipal meltdown. Since all went smoothly, much of that money went unspent.

In San Francisco, the costs of extra policing on Y2K eve soared to more than $1.1 million. The city also spent $85,000 to keep its municipal transit system running all night for free.

Anticipating the biggest party in the state, San Francisco erected two temporary jails to handle the hundreds of arrests expected New Year’s Eve. One lockup, built along the Embarcadero at Pier 31, could have held 300 people; another facility in the basement of the Hall of Justice had room for an equal number. Inmates in the downtown jail were moved to a Navy brig on Treasure Island to free up space.

But it was never needed.

“We did not come close to filling either one,” said Eileen Hirst, a Sheriff’s Department spokeswoman.

Across the bay, Oakland budgeted an extra $300,000 to put 400 officers on duty, twice as many as normal. “It was eerie it was so quiet,” said Officer George Phillips. “We had about 10 arrests, mostly for public drunkenness. On a normal Friday night we have about 75.”

The only significant problem: A reveler shot out a power transformer at midnight, robbing 6,000 people of electricity for more than an hour.

Peace prevailed all over. Sacramento had a quarter of the usual arrests for a weekend night. On Lake Tahoe’s south shore, where more than 50,000 people gathered for the traditional celebration in front of the casinos in Stateline, Nev., arrests were half the normal New Year’s tally.

In many cities, fewer revelers than expected hit the streets because several public celebrations--among them a traditional New Year’s Eve gathering in downtown Long Beach and a Santana concert in the Bay Area--were canceled.

Only a few California cities put on big parties, and some of those arranged for big business to foot most of the bill.

Los Angeles paid about $1 million out of city coffers for security, transportation and other expenses for its sparsely attended, much-maligned New Year’s Eve celebrations, which were largely washed out by rain. Private donors contributed $2 million.

Long Beach spent $40,000 on various events leading up to Y2K, and helped finance a fireworks display during the Queen Mary’s traditional New Year’s bash. San Jose spent $35,000 on a daytime family carnival at its convention center. Stockton put up less than half the cost of a $200,000 alcohol-free party that featured 50 live acts and midnight fireworks.

In San Francisco, private firms paid the $300,000 tab for a fireworks and laser display at the Embarcadero waterfront that drew the bulk of the about 250,000 celebrants who braved the streets that night. A Union Square event featuring gospel singers, drummers and poets cost about $125,000--all of it financed by area businesses.

By far the biggest Y2K costs involved computers.

Cities and counties in California, like governments across the nation, spent huge sums and thousands of hours grappling with anticipated glitches. In San Jose, up to 40,000 staff hours were spent on Y2K preparedness.

Estimates for public and private spending in the United States ranged from $100 billion to more than $300 billion, depending on who does the math. Despite the success on New Year’s, federal and local officials found themselves defending the costs, even as they patted themselves on the back.

“Prevention is hard to get credit for, because nothing happens,” said David Vossbrink, a city spokesman for San Jose. “We didn’t just upgrade our computers, but also did a lot of emergency preparations. In California, you can never be too well prepared, whether it’s fire or flood or earthquake.”

The computer problems that popped up were relatively minor, such as a glitch in San Diego, where a police computer erased several months of reports. Technicians reloaded the data from a backup file.

Some agencies found themselves spending less than expected. The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which serves 16 million people in six Southern California counties, rang up nearly $4 million on computer upgrades to ward off Y2K, about half what it expected to pay. (The district’s Y2K strike team even adopted a motto: “Every computer chip is guilty until proven innocent.”)

Upgrades Made Due to Y2K Effort

Many cities and counties used Y2K as justification for wholesale system upgrades that might otherwise have been put off for years. In some cases, officials said, it simply proved more cost effective to replace computers instead of installing digital Band-Aids.

“There are some long-term benefits,” said Bret Colson, a spokesman for Anaheim, which spent $2.5 million on Y2K. “It’s not like we just flushed it down the toilet. We would be glad to defend our actions to any critics.”

But even some traditional watchdogs of government were reluctant to point fingers.

Jon Coupal, president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn., said there were so many unknowns for businesses and public agencies that the spending seemed justified.

“I’m sure there was some overkill, no doubt about it,” he said. “But in light of the fact everything went smoothly, I don’t sense any broad anger in the taxpayer community.”

Martha Ryan, who runs a charity that houses 1,000 homeless families in the Bay Area, looks at the money spent on Y2K and can’t help but feel a bit envious. “I think we can learn something from this,” she said. “Some of that money could have been better spent to directly serve people.”

Christiana Hayashi, communications manager for San Francisco’s Y2K program management office, said her city’s costs for Y2K paled compared to what corporations spent.

“We accomplished quite a lot for a pretty reasonable amount of money,” Hayashi said. What they got was “an awful lot of little things,” she said, ranging from ensuring that the 911 system would work (it did), to seeing that social welfare payments continued to be mailed out (they were).

Included were costs for upgrades at city hospitals of biomedical devices that have embedded computer chips. Of the 7,000 individual biomedical devices at the city’s hospitals, 120 required Y2K upgrades, Hayashi said. The city also made sure that the citywide power grid for its electric buses was made Y2K compliant.

Los Angeles city officials allocated about $110 million to update computer systems, hire consultants and purchase equipment. The largest effort was devoted to the city’s Department of Water and Power, where officials were anxious about any breakdown that might disrupt service.

Although there were a few small problems on New Year’s Eve--between 3,000 and 5,000 Los Angeles residents lost power for a time--those were the result of rain, not the turning of the clock. All computer systems performed as hoped, said Frank Martinez, who shepherded the Y2K readiness effort.

Los Angeles County suffered no malfunctions, prompting Chief Information Officer Jon Fullinwider to declare the $150 million in preventive medicine well spent.

“We had over 36,000 programs that were found to be noncompliant,” he said. “We would not have been operationally viable on Jan. 1, 2000, if we had not made the changes.”

Bailey reported from Sacramento and Curtius from San Francisco. Times staff writers Jim Newton and Nicholas Riccardi in Los Angeles, Dan Morain in Sacramento and Tony Perry in San Diego also contributed to this story.

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Public Costs for Y2k

Top spending by state governments for Y2k ills.

Sources: State of California, National Assn. of State Information Resource Executives

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California’s biggest cities and state agencies spent more than$800 million to ensure computers didn’t crash with the start of the new millennium.

Sources: Los Angeles Times staff reports * NEW LEGAL BATTLES

Some companies are suing insurers to reclaim computer repair costs related to Y2K. C1