Los Angeles City Controller Laura Chick, who coasted to re-election earlier this month, plans to soon release an audit of the city’s Department of Public Works, followed a month or two later by an audit of the city’s Recreation and Parks Department.

It’s part of an ambitious agenda that includes follow-up audits into contracting practices at the city’s three proprietary departments Los Angeles World Airports, the Harbor Department and the Department of Water & Power.

Her audits of these agencies helped set in motion investigations into city contracting practices, and also cast her as an antagonist to Mayor James Hahn, who is now in a tough re-election campaign runoff. Chick has endorsed the challenger, City Councilman and former Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa.

Chick said she hopes the coming audits will meet with less resistance. “I think other departments have seen what’s happened with the proprietary departments and they seem to be more cooperative,” she told Business Journal reporters and editors last week.

Chick said she also plans to look at the city’s management of workers’ compensation costs, monitor its delivery of services and intensify her search for waste and fraud at City Hall.

“This is not a state-of-the-art, cutting-edge city in the way it’s run,” Chick said. “While the region and the economy have moved forward, our government and politics remains mired in the practices of the 1950s and 1960s.”

City leaders have consistently failed to adopt the best policies that other cities put in place, Chick said. “There’s a feeling that because Los Angeles is the nation’s second largest city, there’s nothing that can be learned by looking at what smaller cities are doing. That’s just plain wrong,” she said.

Chick said Hahn shows little interest in making major changes, which is one reason she endorsed Villaraigosa. But some consider her endorsement to be politically motivated a perception that was reinforced when she held private briefings with each of Hahn’s four major primary challengers about the status of the pay-to-play and overbilling investigations.

“I was very careful about making sure I didn’t do anything ethically wrong. But what I missed was that people could misunderstand or distort what I was briefing the candidates about,” Chick said. “It wasn’t secret or confidential information, but people thought it was. And it went against the fact that I’m all about openness and transparency.”

Nevertheless, Chick insists that as city controller, she should remain active in politics.

“This episode has set me back inside City Hall a little bit, because it happened at the same time I was asking for more resources to go after whistleblower complaints,” she said. “It gave some credibility to my detractors.”

Special Election Fears


Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger plans to call for a special election this fall has L.A. County Registrar-Recorder Conny McCormack steaming.

McCormack is troubled at having to pick up the cost of running the election, which she estimates will cost her office $13 million.

“We still haven’t gotten reimbursed one dime for the $8.5 million we spent in 2003 for the statewide recall election,” McCormack said. “All the initiatives that are circulating could just as easily go on the next regular ballot.”

In the recall, the county was spared the cost impact because of a fortuitous $8 million jump in property transfer fees to her office that year. “We can’t count on that happening again,” she said.

With so many initiatives and so many voters to mail ballots to thanks to high registration for last November’s presidential election the cost will be higher this time, McCormack said.

McCormack and several other county registrars are pushing for legislation that would require the state to reimburse the costs of special statewide elections.

In addition, she’s concerned about a proposed redistricting reform initiative now gathering signatures. The initiative calls for redistricting to take effect with the June 2006 gubernatorial primary, which she said would wreak havoc on the election process.

“The major issue is the timeline,” McCormack said. “Assuming a Nov. 8 election, I don’t see how the lines could be redrawn in time for the Dec. 31, 2005 candidate filing deadline,” she said leaving some candidates suddenly living outside the districts in which they’ve filed to run.

McCormack favors having the redistricting take effect after the next U.S. Census in 2010, a position favored by the state’s Democratic leadership and both parties in California’s congressional delegation.

Englander Sets Up Shop


Veteran local political consultant Harvey Englander, who left MWW Group last month, has launched his own political consulting firm, Englander & Associates.

Englander, who’s been running campaigns and doing political consulting for 25 years, had his own practice before signing on first with the Kamber Group in the early 1990s and then with MWW in 1999.

“After 11 years of corporate life, it’s time to strike out on my own again,” Englander said. “I’m going to be doing the same things that I did at MWW: government affairs, public relations, crisis management and the occasional interesting campaign.”

Englander just wrapped up a successful campaign on behalf of Measure A in Beverly Hills, the referendum on the controversial Montage Hotel project. Last fall, he ran the campaign of Kennedy clan member Bobby Shriver, who won a seat on the Santa Monica City Council.

He was on the losing side last September when he ran the campaign of Glendale Galleria owner General Growth Properties LLC in a referendum on retail developer Rick Caruso’s Town Centre project across the street from the Galleria.

He is in discussion with potential associates.