City Dollars Into the Ether

Anyone who’s tried to decipher a cell phone invoice or choose among calling plans with indecipherable features can sympathize with Los Angeles city officials who run up high-priced additional minutes and roaming charges. Up to a point, that is.

As staff writer Patrick McGreevy reported in Sunday’s Times, some top city officials are tallying monthly cell phone bills of $500 or more, and they’re not even teenagers. This and the rapid increase in the number of employees who use city-supplied cell phones boosted last year’s taxpayer-funded tab to $1.5 million.

No one disputes that cell phones can be a useful tool for government workers, just as they can be for business. But routinely huge bills say more about inattentiveness than productivity.

Take Councilman Dennis Zine, whose $328 monthly average was the highest on the council last year. Zine says he uses the 35-mile commute from his west San Fernando Valley district to make calls. Fair enough. But he regularly exceeds the 2,000 “free” weekday minutes he gets for his $70-a-month plan. At 25 cents for each additional minute, he adds hundreds of dollars to his bill. By changing to a plan with a higher monthly rate but more minutes, he could be both productive and thrifty.

You don’t have to be Einstein to figure this out, but you do have to pay attention. And Zine is not the only city official who has not done so. Public Works Board member Adriana Rubalcava topped Zine for a monthly average of $419 last year. After being asked by The Times to look at February’s $679 bill -- the first time since her 2001 appointment she had even seen one -- she identified and promptly paid $300 worth of personal calls.

Zine, Rubalcava and others interviewed say they rely on staff to pay their bills. That’s fine -- as long as the staff member in charge understands that the point is not just to cut the check but to keep an eye on spending, whether that means shopping for a more suitable plan or (gulp) flagging personal calls and warning the boss about overruns.

In reforms seven years ago, the City Council decentralized oversight of city cell phone use, reasoning that individual departments could more easily detect high costs and take steps to fix the problem. That reasoning is only as good as the people who open the bills.

Slack oversight is bad enough in good times. It’s inexcusable when the City Council says it can’t even afford to hire badly needed police officers.