Taxpayers Getting Clipped by Mailings

Here’s what I learned last week: that the Russians removed Saddam’s WMDs before we could find them, that L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa attended a “Marxist law college,” and that there’s mathematical proof of God’s existence.

You’re wondering if I subscribe to a supermarket tabloid?

Nope.

I’ve stumbled upon some of the intelligence coming out of the office of longtime Los Angeles County Supervisor Mike Antonovich.

A county employee who didn’t like being expected to help distribute these hair-raising bulletins supplied me with several inch-thick packets of clippings assembled and sent out by Antonovich.

At taxpayer expense.

One of the packets, dated April 2005, was a phone book-size monster of 283 pages. The packet weighed 2 pounds and contained dozens of clippings, including Wall Street Journal editorials, religious articles and an American Spectator story comparing President Bush favorably to FDR and Lincoln.

The bundle included a work order filled out by Antonovich’s staff, requesting that the printer roll off 265 copies and return them “to Room 869 ASAP,” Antonovich’s office.

So how much did it cost us for Antonovich to share his world with a wide circle of friends and like-minded citizens? Unfortunately, the answer isn’t easy to come by. The costs of that and many other mass mailings from Antonovich and his fellow giants on the board are hidden in the darkest recesses of county bureaucracy, as if by design.

“Your premise is correct,” county public affairs director Judy Hammond e-mailed me, “in that it is not an easy task for a member of the public or media to ascertain how much is spent by a particular supervisor on mailings.”

It oughta be. To make matters worse, formal requests for public information, like mine, result in a courtesy notice to supervisors, warning them someone has come snooping.

What is this, the Kremlin?

It’s not breaking news that L.A. County supervisors are notoriously big on power and shockingly low on accountability even though the five of them rule over more than 10 million people. But this goes beyond the pale. I was told by county employees that Antonovich is the sultan of mailings compared with other supes, but these employees were reluctant to speak up publicly, fearing they’d be exiled to Siberia -- if not Norwalk.

Naturally, I wanted to find out as much as I could before placing a call to Antonovich, so I spent a couple of weeks sniffing around. With help from Hammond, I made enough progress to find that a mailing like the one mentioned above costs roughly $3,500 in printing and postage.

Then you have to factor in the cost of time spent by Antonovich and his staff, plus the time of county employees involved in loading a quarter of a ton of packages onto carts and running them through the postage machines in the county administration building. I’m told Antonovich cranks up his propaganda machine every month or so.

The total expense isn’t enough to break the bank, but the toll adds up over the years in a county that has seen its share of deep program cuts. Just last week, The Times reported that county officials didn’t have the $30,000 necessary to print an emergency preparedness pamphlet for disabled people.

Meanwhile, Antonovich rings up thousands of dollars in costs to mail out an odd almanac of items that move across his radar screen. I don’t know how many he’s sent out recently, but I got my hands on three of the 2-pound packets compiled this year along with the one from last year.

Some of the material is relevant to county matters, such as clippings on jail overcrowding or the latest disasters at King/Drew Medical Center, where the board’s legendary ineptitude has cost lives. I even found two of my columns in the mix, one of which mentioned Antonovich’s support of former Los Angeles Mayor Jim Hahn. And Antonovich is big on health tips regarding, among other things, Alzheimer’s prevention and prostate health.

But there’s an obvious political bent to much of what he sends, with a sprinkling of Clinton-bashing, breathless reviews of books like “The Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy,” and copies of columns by Bill O’Reilly and Ann Coulter, who appear to be favorites of Antonovich’s. A packet mailed just a couple of months ago includes a Coulter column that attempts to debunk reports of dwindling support for the war in Iraq and other Bush initiatives.

We’ll just have to wait and see if a future mailing from Supervisor Antonovich will include Coulter’s recent comments about 9/11 widows, whom she referred to as “witches,” accusing them of “enjoying their husbands’ deaths” and using the tragedy to make a political point.

As for the startling news of Russia’s absconding with Saddam’s nukes, that came from a magazine called NewsMax. I’d never heard of NewsMax. I went to the website to size up the strange workings of Antonovich’s mind and saw a photo of President Bush along with postings by O’Reilly and bargains galore on Coulter’s books. What a surprise.

The comment about Villaraigosa was a hand-scrawled aside next to a photo caption mentioning the mayor had gone to the Peoples College of Law. The same stack of wisdom features a political cartoon showing a skid row bus pulling into the San Fernando Valley at a “Bum Stop.” Rather un-Christian, don’t you think? And yet in Antonovich’s world, another clipping suggests, you can begin to change your life with five simple words: “The Lord is my shepherd.”

I also came upon articles saying “the unmatched power of the Israel lobby” dictates U.S. foreign policy (Wall Street Journal Online), a satellite “may have found Noah’s Ark” (ABC News), the poor aren’t really all that poor (Wall Street Journal commentary) and the Schwartz Report is the place for a Web listing of “books recommended by the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade.”

I think Uncle Mike’s been in the bunker too long. He’s entitled to his peccadilloes, but I don’t want him banging pots and pans at my expense any more than I’d want Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky sending out rants by Al Franken and Michael Moore. As for Antonovich’s Bible-thumping on the public dime, what about the separation of church and state?

It had occurred to me that Antonovich might be covering the printing and mailing costs out of campaign funds rather than sticking taxpayers with the tab. But a check of available files was inconclusive.

And so finally, on Wednesday, I called Antonovich’s office to ask for a meeting. Spokesman Tony Bell, who of course already knew what I was after because the office had been notified, didn’t seem all that eager for me to have a sit-down with his boss. He pooh-poohed the mailings as no big deal and wondered what there was to talk about.

For starters, I said, I’d like to know who’s picking up the tab.

“The county,” Bell said.

I said I’d like to sit down with Antonovich, plop four of the mailings on his desk, and hear him justify them. I’d also like to know the details of where they’re printed and why the billing is so conveniently obscured.

Bell said they were printed in Antonovich’s eighth-floor office, which didn’t jibe with what I knew. He said he’d check with the boss.

I called back Thursday and Bell said there was nothing new to report, except that the packets weren’t printed in Antonovich’s office. They were printed downstairs somewhere and ended up going through the county mailroom.

That’s what I had been told all along, but neither I nor Hammond could nail it down, in part because no records are kept of mailings by individual supervisors. It just goes on the county tab, which means a supervisor can abuse the process to his heart’s content and never explain what he’s sending or why.

What about my meeting with Antonovich? I asked.

The supervisor’s busy, Bell said.

Doing what? Putting together another mailing?

Bell eventually said Antonovich could squeeze me in on Monday.

Not soon enough, I said, asking if Bell cared to explain for his boss why taxpayers should be subsidizing these 2-pound catalogs.

“The supervisor communicates with a variety of people on a regular basis, and the mail we send to the executive office ... is postage-metered there and goes out with the rest of the mail,” Bell said, telling me the supervisor had long been communicating like this with other community leaders on local and world affairs. “Part of the course of doing business as a supervisor is an exchange of information and ideas.”

Yes, that’s quite a think tank he’s running.

If it’s an exchange of ideas Antonovich is interested in, I’ve got a few.

With all the problems in L.A. County, we don’t need you operating a crackpot clipping service.

Figure out what it has cost us over the years, dip into your own pocket, and pay us back.

The public has a right to know, so open the doors from now on and get out of the way.

See you Monday?

Any county employee with more examples of this kind of nonsense should let me know immediately at steve.lopez@ latimes.com.