Tuesday, April 13, 2004
Page 7
PERSPECTIVES (Column)
City Hall: Bastion of Mischief, Deception and Tricks—Part 1
By ROGER M. GRACE
The City of Los Angeles is far from the political cesspool it was under Mayor Frank Shaw, who was recalled by voters in 1938. In Shaw’s administration, there was widespread corruption, and it was overt. Bribery, political extortion, and vice shielded from prosecution were rampant.
Fletcher Bowron became mayor and there was a clean-up.
But let’s not kid ourselves. The ethical standards of city government today are far from impeccable. There’s favoritism, cronyism, and cheating. But, generally, it’s done in a subtle way, with finesse.
One technique is delay. That which the council passes is not always implemented. Joel Wachs, when he left office as a city councilman in 2001, told of finding a motion of his, calling for some sort of action, that had been passed by the council shortly after he came aboard 20 years earlier. He had second thoughts about it, and colleague John Ferraro (since deceased) told him what to do. He stuck the file in a drawer where it had remained through the years.
While it might not be that corruption is rampant in city hall, shenanigans and connivance most certainly are. Sometimes a malefaction is unearthed by the Ethics Commission, but usually the ploy is too clever, too discrete to be noticed.
What has been noticed by local, state and federal prosecutorial authorities of late is apparent improprieties in the letting of contracts, with those seeking to do business with the city being expected to pave the way with political donations. The current investigations will, I suspect, eventually lead to evidence of misconduct of sizeable proportion.
The foregoing is a preclude to an account of sneakiness and dirty play on the part of city officials. It directly involves City Clerk J. Michael Carey and entails a role of unknown proportion played by Mayor James Hahn, as well as a refusal to get involved on the part of City Controller Laura Chick.
Today, I’ll merely present the background, the history of the dealings of this newspaper with the City of Los Angeles. It will spotlight how delay can be used by the city as a sly technique. Tomorrow I’ll get to the part that entails recent conduct which I believe warrants Grand Jury scrutiny.
It was in the late 1970s or early 1980s that the MetNews made a pitch to the City of Los Angeles to receive some of its legal advertising. I was advised in a letter from a deputy city attorney that we weren’t eligible to carry city notices because the newspaper was printed in Glendale, and printing within the city was required under local enactments.
In 1991, we installed a printing press in our building on Spring Street in downtown Los Angeles. At a ceremony in our basement, Supervisor Mike Antonovich and Los Angeles City Council President Ferraro started up the new press.
The legal impediment to our printing city notices thus removed, we again asked the city to become a customer. It did—but only after several years of persistence on our part.
In response to our nagging, an “Official Notices Task Force,” comprised of representatives of various departments, was set up in August, 1991, and it began meeting. In June, 1993 it issued its report. Included was this conclusion: “Based on a recent request to be considered for primary publication of official notices by the Metropolitan News-Enterprise, the Task Force believes the City should review all publications interested in consideration as the primary publication source to determine the most appropriate one.”
On September 9, 1994, a report from the chief administrative officer to the mayor recommended that the City Council “instruct the City Clerk to issue a request for proposals for the publication of ordinances and other official notices, evaluate responses, and submit the recommended form to the Mayor and City Council for approval.” On November 16, 1994, the City Council adopted a motion to so instruct the clerk.
It thus was a three-year-plus process for the city simply to reach a decision to issue a request for proposals (commonly known as an “RFP.”) Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Daily Journal was receiving the notices, as it had for untold years.
How long would you suppose it would take to issue the mandated RFP? Stand by for the answer.
On May 30, 1996, I wrote a “Dear John” letter to Ferraro which began: “I know you’re busy and many matters come to your office. However, I have yet to receive a response to my letter to you of April 24, 1995.”
I commented:
“For six years, we have been attempting to secure a reasonable share of city advertising. For decades, the Daily Journal has, without contract or competitive bidding, published most all of the city’s public notices. This is favoritism. It is contrary to law and contrary to sound public policy. It took about three years for a report to be finalized which recommends putting the advertising out to competitive bidding. The report was approved by the City Council Nov. 16, 1994. As of last November, the invitations to bid were supposedly a few weeks from being issued. In January, Mike Carey assured us the contract would go out to bid in February. It has not yet gone to bid. In the meantime, we have received a few city notices, for the first time. However, the putting of the contract out to bid is now several years over-due.”
The following day I wrote an additional letter to Ferraro saying:
“Here is a copy of a letter of this date to Michael Carey relating to the matter I brought to your attention by letter yesterday.
“The Clerk’s Office has, to date, failed to obey the City Council’s directive of Nov. 16, 1994 to put a contract for legal advertising out to bid. I hope you can impart to Mr. Carey that City Council directives are to be taken seriously. (Or am I assuming too much?)
“This matter has dragged on far too long. The wrongfulness of the city’s favoritism is manifest, and it should not be necessary to resort to litigation to establish as much.”
We received word that the RFP had been prepared, but that the City Attorney’s Office was reviewing it. Months passed. More months.
In December, 1996, I bumped into then-City Councilman Nate Holden at a Christmas Party hosted by political consultant Joe Cerrell, who each year brings together clients, journalists, and public officials. I told Holden about our plight. He said something along the lines of, “Well, Jimmy’s here, I’ll go over and talk to him.”
He talked with then-City Attorney Hahn, and a week-and-a-half later, the RFP was issued.
That was January, 1997, more than two years after the City Council instructed that the RFP be put out. It might never have occurred—without litigation, at least—had it not been for Holden’s help.
Three proposals were submitted on Feb. 13, 1997—ours, the Daily Journal’s, and that of a company that was disqualified as a non-responsive bidder. The city reviewed the respective prices offered (ours was lower), computer systems (ours was better) and past performance. As to the latter element, the Daily Journal was nearly disqualified as non-responsible. An Oct. 3, 1997 report from chief administrative officer to the mayor recommended that the City Council “[a]uthorize the City Clerk to negotiate and execute a contract with the Metropolitan News Company to provide official notices publication, printing and billing services for an amount not to exceed $650,000 as provided for in the 1997-98 General City Purposes budget” and to “[a]uthorize the City Clerk to use the Metropolitan News Company to publish selected notices in foreign language newspapers when requested by the Mayor and/or City Council.”
On November 4, 1997, the City Council’s Budget & Finance Committee held the first of two meetings at which it reviewed the recommendation of the City Clerk’s Office that the contract be awarded to us. Despite a plethora of misleading arguments to the committee by a slippery lobbyist/lawyer named Neil Papiano, the committee voted favorably on the recommendation. The contract was approved by the City Council, on a 15-0 vote, on Dec. 17, 1997, and went into effect March 1, 1998.
(That unanimous vote would not have been achieved had the council’s president, Ferraro, not spurned the personal plea of his best buddy, Papiano, to put the kibosh on the contract. Ferraro could have done it.)
It took seven years to get the contract, and three years of litigation after that fighting off a Daily Journal action in mandate that sought to snatch the contract from us.
The City Council on Jan. 16, 2001 adopted a resolution, introduced by our guardian angel, Nate Holden, to extend the contract to June 30, 2002. (The motion was seconded by then-Councilman Hal Bernson, who was unaware that Papiano was the Daily Journal’s attorney. Bernson was beholden to Papiano, who had provided large-scale free legal services to him—a matter which did grab the attention of the Ethics Commission and resulted in fines.)
This language was included in the Council-approved motion: “The City Clerk reports that the publication and referral services provided by the Metropolitan News have been excellent during the 3 year period. Numerous enhancements to the process have been suggested and then implemented by the Metropolitan News. The newspaper has also been very responsive to changes suggested by the City Clerk to meet the publication needs of the City.”
A new RFP was subsequently issued. It called for the quotation of a price for publishing notices in the proposer’s own newspaper, as well as locking in the rate, for the term of the contract, that would be charged for notices farmed out to other specified newspapers. This created a distinct element of chance inasmuch as those other newspapers could raise their rates whenever it suited their fancy.
Nonetheless, we made our proposal. In light of scathing comments by city evaluators in 1996 about the Daily Journal’s performance in processing city notices, and our own lauded performance after gaining the contract, I fully expected to win.
But somebody told somebody that the Daily Journal was to get that contract.
Tomorrow I’ll get into the tale of how the contract was snatched from us, by means foul, not fair. And you might be left wondering if the ghost of Frank Shaw does not yet lurk in City Hall, whispering advice into ears.
Copyright 2004, Metropolitan News Company