L.A. County supervisors exert unusual and perhaps improper influence on planners, audit suggests

A long-awaited audit released this week by Los Angeles County officials found that the Board of Supervisors at times used behind-the-scenes levers to influence the inner workings of the planning department, whose decisions are key to battles over development, environmental protections and code enforcement.

The audit was initiated after a regional planning director said he was fired last year after blowing the whistle on supervisors’ intrusion in department affairs.

In most cases, the outside auditors hired by the county were unable to substantiate or refute the allegations of former regional planning director Bruce McClendon. But their report suggests the elected leaders have played unusually strong roles in the department’s day-to-day affairs, and in some cases intervened improperly. Among the examples cited in the report:

* Supervisor Gloria Molina’s planning deputy, Nicole Englund, hand-picked department staffers to go to professional conferences in Las Vegas and San Francisco despite former director Bruce McClendon’s claim that he told her their attendance would amount to a “junket.”

Investigators determined that Englund ordered the department to fund the Las Vegas trip with $20,307.62 of federal money intended to improve quality of life in the community. They said such an expenditure “could lead to the conclusion that travel and training are ineligible expenses.” The San Francisco trip was funded by Englund with $18,244 of voter-approved transportation funds, the report said.

* Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky’s planning deputy, Ben Saltsman, and Supervisor Mike Antonovich’s planning deputy, Paul Novak, issued conflicting e-mails to department staffers during the development of a Green Building ordinance that “could be interpreted as violating” rules that prohibit supervisors from issuing directives to employees outside public meetings.

* Former Supervisor Yvonne B. Burke’s planning deputy, Mike Bohlke, pressured department staffers to increase their recommended cap for the number of wells eligible for drilling in the Inglewood oil fields before supervisors’ public vote. When the employees suggested more community input first, he wrote “Enough is Enough ... !!!!!” in an e-mail to top department officials, the report said.

In an interview, Molina said the conference attendees were not picked by her deputy and that the auditors failed to realize that all of the money for the trips came from funds granted to her office, not the department.

Yaroslavsky said it was appropriate for his deputy to guide legislation that he was sponsoring. Antonovich said through a spokesman that Novak would not be admonished. Bohlke declined to comment.

The audit was initiated by the county’s auditor-controller after the supervisors fired McClendon in January 2009. McClendon had received a positive job evaluation several months before, and said he was fired after revealing supervisors’ intrusions to Chief Executive William T Fujioka and enforced rules against such meddling.

The investigators were asked to look narrowly at whether the county’s “non-intrusion clause” had been violated. The clause states that no board member “shall give orders to or instruct any county officer or employee, but may seek information and/or seek assistance.”

The audit noted that “many of Mr. McClendon’s allegations involve one-on-one conversations over the phone or in person. There were no recordings of these conversations and therefore little or no evidence to support or refute his claims in these instances.”

The audit, overseen by Auditor-Controller Wendy Watanabe, who reports directly to the supervisors, ultimately was contracted out to Harvey M. Rose Associates in an effort to ensure impartiality.

A separate audit investigating whether McClendon was fired for whistle-blowing was completed last year, but officials declined to release it, saying it would invade his privacy. County officials initially declined to release the latest audit as well, but did so after limited revisions were made at the request of supervisors.

McClendon said he was disappointed that the audit’s findings were not more far-reaching and said he had been hamstrung in making his case because county officials confiscated all of his files when he was fired. Although auditors said in their report that they offered him access to his files, McClendon said that was inaccurate.

garrett.therolf@latimes.com