Lawsuit Over Firing Settled

The Los Angeles City Council approved a $490,000 settlement Friday for a former employee who said he was fired after probing whether private attorneys had overbilled the city.

The city also has spent $293,000 through last September on outside counsel defending itself in the case, said Jonathan Diamond, a spokesman for the city attorney’s office. Diamond said it would take several days to tabulate expenses since then.

The case was brought by Daniel Carvin, 62, who worked for three months as an investigator for City Controller Laura Chick in 2002. He previously held similar positions with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the Internal Revenue Service, NASA and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Louis J. Cohen, Carvin’s attorney, alleged that his client was fired because Chick’s office was unwilling to look into the billing practices of the Brown, Winfield and Canzoneri law firm, a donor to a number of politicians. The city had hired the firm in connection with work at the Hyperion water treatment plant.

“My case is a case study in exactly the point I was making when I was fired -- that too much money was being spent and there were ways to protect taxpayer dollars,” Carvin said.

The Times reported last year that City Atty. Rocky Delgadillo’s office spent $18.9 million in 2003 on outside lawyers -- twice what the city spent five years earlier.

That prompted state Sen. Richard Alarcon (D-Sun Valley) to call a state hearing last summer at which Carvin testified that Chick was too politically connected to Delgadillo to investigate his office.

Through a spokesman, Chick declined to comment Friday because the settlement agreement had not yet been signed.

Last year, Chick described Carvin as a disgruntled former employee who was fired for overstepping the bounds of his job.

The settlement, approved in closed session, comes as the council is pursuing efforts to eliminate waste and use the money to hire more police.