Guzzling Gas Big-Time on Taxpayers’ Dime

I just happened to be in the Glendale neighborhood where Los Angeles County Supervisor Mike Antonovich lives and noticed a big black Cadillac with tinted windows out front of his house, parked near a flagpole flying the red, white and blue. The car had a CA Exempt license plate, which meant it was a county car, and the odd thing is that it was midafternoon on a weekday.

Shouldn’t the supervisor have been at work?

I hung around for a couple of hours to catch any comings and goings, and to marvel at the size of the Cadillac. It was the DHS model, which stands for DeVille High-Luxury Sedan. That model comes with “elegantly gathered leather upholstery,” as a buying guide describes it. It was large enough to be a float in the Rose Parade.

But apparently not quite luxurious enough for the man who calls himself “the mayor of Los Angeles County.”

I left the stakeout for about 20 minutes and returned to a bit of a surprise. The Caddy I had seen was gone. But another one, newer and shinier, was parked in its place. The new Caddy was also a DeVille High-Luxury Sedan with county plates.

Curious, don’t you think?

Over the next couple of weeks, I made several trips back to the Glendale hills to investigate the mystery, and I think I finally figured it out.

Antonovich has a personal driver, paid for by us, who ferries him about. The driver heads up to the boss’s house in the older-model Cadillac in the morning, parks it, and takes Antonovich to work in the newer Cadillac, a 2004 model. At the end of the day, the routine is reversed.

If what I witnessed is a daily exchange, one supervisor seems to be tying up two Cadillacs, one of which is almost always idle. Antonovich should at least keep the doors of the car open: We could cut the homeless population in half.

Naturally, lots of questions popped into my head:

Who does Antonovich think he is? Why does he need a driver at all? Are the other supervisors guilty of the same kind of excess? And just who’s paying for them to fill the tanks of those gas-guzzling hogs?

I began searching for the answers, but as you may recall, Antonovich’s office has not been all that responsive to my questions since I started writing about his periodic mailings at taxpayer expense.

If you missed those columns, they reported how Antonovich has no qualms about putting staffers to work gathering up news clippings, religious materials and the occasional offensive joke. He’ll order more than 250 copies of these inch-thick collections printed up, packaged and mailed to friends and acquaintances, all on the county dime.

Trying to discreetly find out more about the cars, though, wasn’t going to be easy. The supervisors, who rule over nearly $20 billion and more than 10 million lives, strictly control access to public information, which is one reason they’re often referred to as the five little kings. The county executive staff is under orders to immediately notify the supervisors when journalists go snooping.

I called public information officer Judy Hammond for a clarification of what questions I could ask without her having to tip off supervisors, and she stopped me in my tracks.

Antonovich and the others would expect to hear about every question I asked, she said.

You’d almost think they’ve got something to hide.

If every word out of my mouth gets communicated to supervisors, I told Hammond I’d like to say hello to Mr. Antonovich, and I hope he’s having a nice summer.

Duty-bound, she passed it along.

After hitting that wall, I dug up all the information I could get on my own. Later, I sent in an official request for more, and in dribs and drabs, the story got more interesting.

The supervisors each have $3.4 million a year to hire staff and run their offices. The figure includes discretionary funds they can dole out at will to community groups, which makes for a convenient investment in their own reelection. Or they can buy cars and hire chauffeurs.

Antonovich is the only one with Cadillac taste, but the other supervisors have plenty of leg room too. In a metropolis choked with smog, you’d think at least one supervisor would set an example by going hybrid or at least choosing a more modest and fuel-efficient set of wheels, but no such luck.

Your tax dollars just bought Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke a 2006 Chrysler 300 for $42,000. Supervisors Zev Yaroslavsky and Gloria Molina are tooling around in 2000 Buick Park Avenues. Supervisor Don Knabe leases a 2004 Ford Expedition, an SUV roughly the size of the Staples Center, for $600 a month.

Don’t these guys know we’re at war in the oil fields of the Middle East? If the size of the cars were based on the size of their accomplishments, the supervisors would all be driving Mini Coopers.

Antonovich’s latest DeVille High-Luxury Sedan, by the way, is a $626-a-month lease.

But the car story gets even better. It isn’t uncommon for the supes to outfit their employees with county cars they can take home at night. Once again, you’d think the idea would be to promote mass transit, or to at least follow the model of private industry and have employees use their own cars and get reimbursed for mileage.

Forget about it.

Knabe’s office has 10 cars for downtown and field offices, Antonovich’s has 11, Yaroslavsky’s has 12, and Molina and Burke’s offices have 13 each.

That’s 59 cars, plus one assigned to each supervisor, for a grand total of 64 vehicles, or nearly as many as SuperShuttle. With that big a fleet, they should be delivering pizza to everyone who pays taxes. If not that, maybe they should start their own Enterprise Rent-A-Car franchise and kick the revenues over to some of the public health programs they’ve whacked over the years.

I also learned that Burke and Knabe, like Antonovich, have drivers escorting them about and performing a few other duties, while Molina and Yaroslavsky have proved themselves capable of driving.

“She feels it is superfluous,” Molina spokeswoman Roxane Marquez said when I asked why her boss doesn’t have a chauffeur. “She can drive herself.”

Knabe has a history of hiring ex-cops to drive him around, and they are sometimes armed.

“There have been threats made against the supervisor and his family in the past, and new threats continue to be a reality of his job today,” said Knabe spokesman David Sommers. “Temporary restraining orders have had to be secured in the past and likely will be again in the future.”

Go figure. Although, having attended a board meeting or two and watched supervisors waste time mugging for the camera while handing out stacks of scrolls and plaques, I guess I can understand why they’d be looking over their shoulders. If only they managed the county’s festering problems as well as they manage their fleet.

Tony Bell, Antonovich’s spokesman, told me by e-mail that his boss’s driver is an armed former Pasadena police officer who carries a weapon because of threats against the supervisor. But he wouldn’t say when the last threat was reported to police.

“SECURITY CONCERNS PREVENT A RESPONSE TO THIS,” Bell said.

Sounded pretty top-secret, so I didn’t press. If Bell were to tell me, he might also have to kill me.

As for the Cadillac that’s often parked at the house all day, Bell told me Mrs. Antonovich doesn’t drive it, although “SHE HAS BEEN DRIVEN TO MEET THE SUPERVISOR AT HIS OFFICE TO ATTEND EVENTS TOGETHER.”

I’M NOT SURE WHAT’S UP WITH ALL THE CAPITAL LETTERS, BUT IT MAKES ME KIND OF NERVOUS, LIKE WHEN I GET MAIL FROM PEOPLE WHO CUT LETTERS OUT OF MAGAZINES.

That second Caddy has 140,000 miles on it, and it’s assigned to the ex-cop and driver, Bell said, and it also serves as the supervisor’s “BACKUP VEHICLE.” Having it parked in the hills of Glendale isn’t a waste, Bell assured me, because “IT’S AVAILABLE FOR USE AT ALL TIMES.”

I’m going to have to confess I just don’t get the “backup vehicle” idea. I guess what they mean is that if one Caddy breaks down, Mayor Mike wants another one ready to roll.

Actually, it could be a security issue. Maybe both Cadillacs are driven to public events, with Antonovich behind the tinted glass of one and a dummy or a double behind the glass of the other. Just like a king.

Reach the columnist at steve.lopez@latimes.com and read previous columns at www.latimes.com/lopez