Nineteen seventy-two marked the height of violence in Northern Ireland among Catholics, Protestants, and the British. On Sunday, January 30, British paratroopers fired on a group of unarmed protesters in Londonderry, killing 13 and wounding 17. Five of the injured were shot in the back. Last month, after 40 years of an investigation costing more than $280 million and running about 5,000 pages, the British government apologized for an unjustified attack against Catholic protesters. British Prime Minister David Cameron said, “I am deeply patriotic. I never want to believe anything bad about our country. But…you do not defend the British Army by defending the indefensible.” We want to believe in good I feel the same way about Los Angeles. I do not want to believe anything bad about our city, its management, or its employees. But we cannot defend the indefensible… I’ve just completed serving three years as President of the Los Angeles Quality & Productivity Commission, a group of citizens charged with helping our municipality improve the cost-effectiveness and efficiency of its more than 40,000 employees. I know from first-hand experience that by far the greatest majority of those employees are hard-working, honest, and that we taxpayers get more than our fair value from their labors. But in a barrel of 40,000 good apples, there are bound to be a few bad ones. But we should be able to depend on good municipal management systems to root out and deal with those that don’t measure up to our core (forgive the apple pun) values. Does our City have a system to conduct investigations into its practices, financial management, systems, and employees? Yes; that’s the job of Los Angeles Controller Wendy Greuel, and she’s doing a good job of it. But is she merely the sound of one hand clapping, or are City leaders taking her audits, analyzing them, and implementing corrections that will save us money and improve our management and productivity? Of course, it’s not really an issue (he wrote facetiously). We all know Los Angeles has money to burn. We’re closing libraries, laying off employees, and cutting back on lots of city services, but that shouldn’t be a reason for our city to collect the monies owed to it, should it? Judge for yourself On July 1, the Controller’s Office released a follow-up to a previous audit of the city’s billings and collections. That document shows that “Although some progress was made, it appears that the City remains stuck in the mud in making the structural changes necessary to collect the money owed to it.” And in the following paragraph: “Overall, for the departments we sampled, we found that only 53% of the City’s bills were collected” (emphasis in original). “The most egregious examples of uncollected funds are parking citations and Emergency Management Services (EMS) billing accounts, where the City is only collecting 53% and 38% of the money it is owed, respectively,” the report continues. Anyone out there who would be satisfied to have your business collect 53 percent of the money owed to it, please raise your red-ink-stained hands. How’s this for specifics? The summary includes the following: “The City still has not created a centralized billing process under the Office of Finance, which should result in millions in increased collections. “The Police Commission and Fire Department do not refer delinquent accounts to the Office of Finance or an outside collection agency quickly enough. “The Fire Department needs to hire a contractor to ensure that accurate billing information is collected when an EMS service is provided, which they have been talking about for over 3 years.” Example Two How a city – or a state, or a country, or a business – manages and controls its money is always going to be a key to solvency. How Los Angeles manages and controls its money clearly needs some help. Los Angeles has a Supply Management System (SMS) that is supposed to provide the oversight to the purchasing procedure. A recent audit by the Controller found that more than 100 employees who had been terminated – some as far back at 2002 – but did not have their purchasing authority rescinded. Of the 126 active SMS users who have been terminated, 42 were members of the LAPD and 32 of the Department of Public Works. More than half of the terminated employees from the 17 departments audited by the Controllers’ Office came from just these two departments! Depressed Yet? Just these two examples (and if you want to see more depressing audit results, visit the Controller’s website, controller.lacity.org) lead to the inevitable questions: “Who’s in charge?” “Who’s addressing and fixing this?” “What are our elected officials doing about this?” Have there been televised hearings with City Council members asking pointed questions about how these things happen, when and how are they going to be fixed, and how can we be sure they never happen again? Has the Mayor called these department managers into tough meetings and demanded answers to similar questions, and is he dealing with inappropriate, incomplete, or unsatisfactory responses? It’s all enough to have a man lose faith in some of the people we elect to run our city. Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one. – Thomas Paine Martin Cooper is President of Cooper Communications, Inc. He is Immediate Past President of the Los Angeles Quality and Productivity Commission; a member of the Los Angeles Business Retention and Attraction Task Force; Vice Chairman-Marketing of the Boys & Girls Club of the West Valley; and a member of the Boards of the Valley Economic Alliance and of the LAPD’s West Valley Jeopardy Program. He is Past Chairman of VICA and Chairman of its Board of Governors; Past President of the Public Relations Society of America-Los Angeles Chapter and of the Encino Chamber of Commerce. He can be reached at [email protected].