Many Battles for Slum Task Force

Despite a record of putting slumlords in jail, a Los Angeles task force that has battled with the owners of the Palomar Hotel is badly hampered by inadequate staffing, bureaucratic turf wars and overly lenient judges, city officials said Friday.

The problem is so serious that a group of civic leaders met Aug. 2 with City Atty. Rocky Delgadillo to urge steps to improve the task force’s performance.

“We brought to his attention what we thought were significant problems,” said UCLA law professor Gary Blasi, one of several in the meeting with Delgadillo.

Blasi served on a panel of citizens concerned about slum housing that in 1997 issued a report that was highly critical of Los Angeles’ efforts to deal with the estimated 156,000 substandard apartments in the city.

The task force oversaw attempts for more than a year to get repairs made to the Palomar, the Hollywood apartment building that was swept by an explosion and fire Thursday. Two people were killed and several others were injured. Arson investigators have not established the fire’s cause or any link to safety violations in the building, owned by Juan and Luz Ortiz of North Hills.

Conceived in 1980 as a way to attack the worst slum properties with the combined resources of prosecutors and health, fire and building inspectors, the 15-member task force has a history of successfully prosecuting owners of substandard buildings.

With most landlords making fixes when attorneys threaten to file charges, the task force has played a role in getting about 24,000 apartments brought into compliance since 1985, a fact touted by then-City Atty. James K. Hahn during his campaign for mayor this year.

To focus on the worst cases, the task force handles only larger buildings with at least 20 code violations, said Deputy City Atty. Richard Bobb, who headed the task force until last month.

However, the task force has seen the number of criminal cases it files decline from a high of 88 in 1995-96 to 56 last year, when eight landlords were sent to jail.

Mayor Hahn and other city officials said the decline in cases filed was caused by several problems, including a shortage of housing inspectors.

“There need to be more inspectors,” said Julie Wong, a Hahn spokeswoman. “The city attorney’s office can only prosecute cases that are brought to them.”

One result of the 1997 report was the creation of a special unit in the Housing Department to systematically inspect every one of the city’s 750,000 apartments at least once every three years.

However, the Housing Department warned the City Council recently that the number of inspectors budgeted for the program--57--is enough to get to every apartment only every five years.

Former task force chief Bobb said it needs other staff, including attorneys, as well.

“There is no way we have enough staff to handle all the potential cases,” he said. “I could take you out right now and show you 500 properties that should be [targeted by] the Slum Housing Task Force.”

In addition, the enforcement efforts have been hampered by a lack of cooperation between city agencies, some officials said.

Ron Field, a citizens committee member, said the Slum Housing Task Force and the new housing inspection unit have not always worked well together.

“There is a problem with communication between the agencies,” said Field, who is with the Los Angeles Housing Law Project. “There is a lack of appreciation on both sides.”

Bobb said the task force has had to send back a majority of the cases submitted by the Housing Department because the information is not complete enough to back a criminal filing.

Ken Simmons, who oversees the systematic code inspection program, said the working relationship with the task force is “improving,” although Field said the blue-ribbon panel pressed Delgadillo this month to assign two new attorneys to the Housing Department to further smooth the process.

Another problem hampering the task force is what happens when cases are filed with the court.

During a public hearing Friday on the Palomar Hotel fire, Councilman Eric Garcetti complained that some judges do not mete out sufficiently harsh sentences to slumlords.

“We still have a culture in the judicial system where these crimes are not taken seriously,” said Garcetti, vice chairman of the council’s Housing Committee. “If we had burglaries going on every single day in a home, we would crack down on that home. Judges would take seriously those crimes.”

Garcetti noted that only after he and others held a news conference about one slumlord this week did a judge uphold a sentence requiring the man to live in his own substandard building.

“There needs to be a bigger stick in punishments,” Field said. “We don’t see these guys going to jail” as often as they should.

Delgadillo, who was out of town Friday, is weighing the request of the citizens panel to take steps to improve the task force and slum enforcement, said spokesman Ben Austin.

“He is taking a serious look at this department to see how it can function more effectively,” Austin said.