Beware Bureaucrats Who Get Financially ‘Creative’

You gotta love the big undead hands that rise from the runoff in “Night of the Living Sludge,” courtesy of the district attorney’s office. Ditto the green ooze from Trash Monsters all over the place. Still, there’s a certain dread at the goofy climax of the 23-minute anti-pollution video as the mad scientist chides, “I haf eggspected zis night for a long time!”

“It’s not my fault!” one of the poor green-faced trash creatures gargles to the audience in subtitles. “Youuuu . . . created . . . meeee!”

How true, Sludgie. Los Angeles County has no one but itself to thank for the weird fiscal science that inexplicably brought “Night of the Living Sludge” to a class of nodding-off fifth-graders near you. With an introduction starring Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti and a baby giraffe that licks his neck whilst he giggles, the 1996 video itself actually has a kind of clumsy unconscious humor. But its financing, like its toxic slime pit, gives off fumes.

As detailed Sunday by The Times’ Ted Rohrlich, the fund from which “Sludge” arose is actually a sort of in-house D.A.’s charity for which polluters appear to have been legally shaken down in settlements by deputy D.A.s. It’s small potatoes, and what money there is in it seems to have gone for odd projects--the L.A. County Science Fair, for instance--but the critics don’t like it. It’s “legalized extortion,” in the words of one national wag.

It’s true that, among smog spewers, the District Attorney Crime Prevention Foundation smacks of the cop who pulls you over and, with the threat of a ticket looming, wonders if you’d like to contribute to the Widows and Orphans Fund. But “extortion” to put Garcetti’s stamp on science projects and rainy-day school movies is less the problem than the symptom. Foundations like the D.A.’s are what happens when taxpayers imagine you can get something for nothing--and bureaucrats are given the choice between getting “creative” and seeing their budgets cut.

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The Crime Prevention Foundation, for instance, grew out of the D.A.’s environmental crimes section, which had a history of persuading judges to sign off on settlements that forced polluters to contribute to environmental charities. When the recession hit in the early 1990s, the environmental crimes section itself became an endangered species. Garcetti was facing the loss of up to a quarter of his budget. Word was the section--which wasn’t Garcetti’s baby, but the creation of the D.A. before him--would be dismantled and redeployed.

Understand, these were desperate times. Still, it’s never good when county employees suddenly decide to become entrepreneurial go-getters. Bureaucrats, like cats, frequently tend to make messes when they think outside the box. For a while, The Times’ piece revealed, the environmental crimes section was persuading judges to have defendants contribute directly to the D.A.’s office as a condition of settling the charges against them. By 1994, Garcetti was using the foundation as the in-house collection point for settlement largess.

That’s not how budgets are supposed to be drawn up in the public sector; theoretically, taxes and fines and so forth get levied and people get elected to divvy up the money according to the priorities of the electorate. The criminal justice system is a branch of government, and funded accordingly. It’s not supposed to have little pots of private money lying around.

But therein lies the rub. The criminal justice system now oozes with little pots of private money, which are polluting wider fields than toxic crime. The D.A. relies on a special fund--controlled by insurers--to prosecute workers’ compensation insurance fraud. The civil courts are burgeoning with rent-a-judges. The upshot has been a wave of fraud prosecution that, incredibly, has left crooked insurance companies utterly untouched, and a judicial system that depends increasingly on the best judge your money will buy.

In cases like the D.A.’s charity, the private cache has so many strings attached sometimes that there’s no useful way to spend it. But in post-Proposition 13 California, the state holds the purse strings; counties have few resources and scant control. In a world like that, even useless money is hard to part with. So the entrepreneurial approach to the administration of justice continues to ooze, its outflow an ethical swamp that too frequently drains into a moral sewer.

“Don’t approach!” someone warns as the sludge creatures circle. “Not only can it be hazardous, but it can be a little bit icky and partly stinky!” How true.

Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.