Online voting is about to become a reality in three California counties, including L.A.

You go online to post your vacation photos, buy birthday gifts and share your relationship status.

But if you want to use the Internet to register to exercise one of the most fundamental rights of American citizenship—casting a vote—you’ve been out of luck.

Until now.

The county is embarking on a project with the California Secretary of State to make online voter registration a reality here before the November presidential election.

The $270,873 county program, paid for by federal funds passed along by the state, is part of the California Online Voter Registration Project that seeks to make registration easier for the 9 million Californians—39% of the eligible population—who aren’t currently signed up to vote.

While it won’t change the requirement mandating registration 15 days before an election, it will make it easier for those who push it right up to the wire—like the thousands of county residents who tried, and failed, to register to vote in time for the last presidential election.

“In 2008, we received literally several thousand registration forms the day after the registration cutoff,” said Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Dean Logan. “These were people who, at the point that they were engaged and interested in becoming active voters, the system in essence failed them, through an administrative deadline. It’s hard to measure the loss of that. You wonder, will they come back if they didn’t get to vote in the one election where they were interested?”

The system will allow would-be voters to sign their registration forms electronically using e-signatures on file with the DMV. A widget on the county’s voting website, www.lavote.net, will send them to the Secretary of State’s site to register online beginning in late August or early September, Logan said.

The move to electronic registration is part of a broader movement to modernize the nation’s voting systems and remove barriers to electoral participation. Only 10 states, including Washington, Oregon and Arizona, currently have online registration. California is in the process of becoming the 11^th, under Senate Bill 397 passed last year. Los Angeles, Orange and Trinity are the three counties that will be pioneering the process for their respective voting systems, before the whole state follows suit.

In a letter to the Board of Supervisors, which this week approved the county’s participation in the program, Logan and county Chief Information Officer Richard Sanchez said that younger voters between the ages of 18 and 25 are most likely to take advantage of the online registration option.

But Logan said it will also make it easier for anyone who moves within the state to keep their voter registration up to date.

Posted 4/17/12

That was the conclusion of a team of consultants hired by the county to investigate how the assessor came to produce two widely different predictions of money that would be generated by this year’s property taxes. In one fell swoop, the amount of growth forecast for property values plunged from $18.6 billion in December to $5.1 billion in April—an unwelcome surprise for financially-strapped local government entities, including the county, that rely on the funds.

An irate Board of Supervisors last month called the disparity shocking and unprecedented, and ordered a top-to-bottom audit of the office run by Assessor John Noguez, who already was under fire for allegedly giving special treatment to certain property owners, an accusation he has denied.

On Tuesday, the first phase of that audit was presented to the supervisors, and it did not paint a flattering portrait of assessor operations.

Consultants from the firm Rosenow Spevack Group found numerous flaws in how the two forecasts were reached—from failing to account for home price volatility at the close of last year to making errors in math. RSG, which was retained by the county’s auditor-controller, concluded that the December forecast of 1.77 percent revenue growth was too high and that the April forecast of .49 percent growth was too low.

Based on more complete information, RSG and the Assessor’s Office now agree that rate of growth in property tax revenue will be closer to 1.14%.

L.A. County Assessor John Noguez

The most significant forecasting error, according to RSG, was the assessor’s failure to recognize, and account for, an unexpected decline in value for hundreds of thousands of parcels in the final quarter of last year. The assessor’s office had based its December forecast on information generated between January and September 2011, when prices were relatively stable, without examining available sales data or economic analyses for the latter part of the year. The result: an overly optimistic forecast, Jim Simon of RSG told the board.

Mistakes were also made in the April forecast, he said, including an overstatement of the estimated drop in the property tax roll because of “a calculation error.”

In a letter accompanying RSG’s report, Auditor-Controller Wendy Watanabe noted that, during the past several years, the assessor’s office has been hit with numerous retirements in key management roles, “which has resulted in significant turnover in the staff who prepare the roll forecasts.” Watanabe’s office is now examining the management of the assessor’s office, including whether it has been hurt by the controversies surrounding Noguez, who, along with other members of his staff, are under investigation by the District Attorney’s public integrity unit.

That a controversy over forecasts could even flare seems unique to Los Angeles government.

According to RSG, it appears that no other assessor in the state is producing multiple forecasts like Los Angeles. For 20 years, the L.A. County assessor has been producing three of them as a way to help the county’s Chief Executive Office prepare the county’s preliminary budget. Under state law, an assessor is only required to produce an annual forecast in May, if asked to do so by a governing body of a taxing agency.

“Their primary function is to be assessors” evaluating properties, Simon said, “not forecasters.”

Still, with the likelihood that multiple forecasts in Los Angeles County will continue, Simon’s team suggested a number of ways for the assessor to increase accuracy. They include: using the most current data available; evaluating properties on a more geographic-specific level, obtaining input from economists and other experts, and providing a range of values in forecasts, instead of settling on a specific number.

Posted 5/16/12

Bathing beauties were still posing on county lifeguard trucks in 1959. Photo/LA County Lifeguard Assn.

Summer isn’t summer in Los Angeles County without the bright yellow vehicles of the beach patrol.

“Iconic” is how Chief Lifeguard Mike Frazer described them last week as the Board of Supervisors gave the Department of Beaches and Harbors authority to sign a proposed agreement to take ownership of the fleet’s latest additions—45 custom-built Ford Escape hybrids that the county has leased since 2008. Under that proposed agreement, Ford Motor Co. would continue to advertise itself as the “Official Vehicle Sponsor” of the L.A. County beach lifeguards. So far, however, Ford has not agreed to a transfer of ownership.

Outfitted with state-of-the-art rescue equipment, the vehicles have saved not only lives but also more than $267,000 a year in fuel costs. “We’ve come a long way,” Chief Frazer says.

In fact, as the photo gallery below shows, beach rescue vehicles have come farther than Southern Californians might imagine. And to look back at their history is to dip into the region’s evolving—and sometimes dangerous—relationship with the beach.

Arthur Verge, an El Camino College history professor and veteran county lifeguard, notes that there was a time, not so long ago, when Southern Californians regarded the ocean as a frightening place that was best admired from afar. “Drownings were sadly common,” Verge says, adding that those who did go into the water often had no idea how to swim or how to get out of the powerful rip-currents that swept them out to sea in their heavy wool bathing outfits.

A county lifeguard and his Ford Escape are a lean, green team.

Professional ocean lifeguards didn’t even exist here until the early 1900s, when the City of Long Beach and real estate developers Abbot Kinney and Henry Huntington began paying “lifesavers” to reassure tourists outside the Long Beach Plunge and to promote the then-new developments of Venice and Redondo Beach.

Notably, Kinney and Huntington turned in 1907 to George Freeth, a celebrated Hawaiian surfer who not only trained L.A. County’s first generation of lifeguards but also pioneered rescue response.

“While fire departments were using horse-drawn rigs,” Verge says, “George Freeth, as early as 1912, was patrolling the beaches of Redondo, Hermosa and Manhattan Beach with a motorcycle, carrying a metallic rescue can in a special sidecar.”

Other early lifeguards were more low-tech.

“Santa Monica’s first lifeguard, ‘Cap’ Watkins, patrolled the beach on horseback,” Verge notes. “And George Wolf, the first Los Angeles city lifeguard, rode back on forth from Venice to El Segundo on a bike.”

By the late 1920s, both the city and county had lifeguards and trucks that ferried their gear along the boardwalks. That gear was stretched thin in the 1930s as the county lifeguards took over the beaches in the economically struggling South Bay.

“We didn’t get any new vehicles until the late ‘40s because World War II was on,” recalls Cal Porter, an 88-year-old retired county lifeguard and Malibu surfer. “If somebody had a bad rescue…we’d jump into this old 1933 International we had and head down Pacific Coast Highway. We’d be going as fast as we could, lights and sirens going—but all the other cars would be passing us.”

With wartime came the 4-wheel-drive jeep, developed by Willys-Overland Motors for the U.S. Army. The Willys allowed lifeguards for the first time to skip the boardwalk and drive directly across the sand. The jeeps were redeployed onto county beaches in the late 1940s; some remained in use for the next twenty years.

By the 1960s, the county had a fleet of Ford trucks with special racks for lifesaving equipment. Beaches filled with Baby Boomers and, occasionally, the products of the era’s experimental mood:  In 1970, the county bought two customized dune buggies from the designer Meyers Manx. “But they didn’t work,” Verge says. “Sand would get into the carburetor.”

Lifeguard operations consolidated in the mid-1970s under the county, which by 1975 had the world’s largest lifeguard organization—a distinction that brought marketing opportunities. Among them was the chance for car companies to become the “official” rescue vehicle supplier to the now renowned L.A. County beach lifeguards.

Kerry Silverstrom, chief deputy director of the county Department of Beaches and Harbors, says that in 1986, Nissan and the beach lifeguards signed an agreement. “They got name recognition, ad copy and the ability to say they’re the official vehicle of the County beaches,” she notes, “and we got to use their vehicles for free.”

Nissan’s deal—releasing 30 chrome yellow 4×4 King Cab lifeguard trucks and six light pewter Stanza wagons onto the county beaches—lasted until 1994, when Ford won the contract. Nissan got it back in 1999, but Ford made another comeback with the hybrid SUVs in 2008.

Frazer says lifeguards were accustomed to pickup trucks with gas engines, and concerned that sand might damage hybrids. “But one of our missions is to protect the environment, so we said, ‘Let’s see if this works.’ ”

He says the results have been striking.

“The visibility is amazing and the turning radius is almost twice what we had, so we can navigate crowds better,” he says. “It has traction even in places like Point Dume, which has a steep sloping beach. “

Silverstrom says the relationship with Ford has been a financial and environmental lifesaver as the economy and the Internet have made branding rights a tougher sell at beaches. As for the next generation of vehicles, Frazer says the lifeguards “continue to look at all the options.” After all, only 100 years have passed since George Freeth rode to the rescue on his motorbike.

Posted 5/9/12

Metro's Kasey Shuda appears in a new video explaining the coming Ramp Jam at Wilshire and the 405.

We got through Carmageddon last summer. Now it’s time to navigate Ramp Jam.

Long-running closures of the 405 Freeway’s Wilshire Boulevard ramps are set to begin on Friday, June 22, bringing fresh challenges to an intersection that’s already among the nation’s worst.

Anxious residents and employees in the area have been girding for the start of the ramp work for months. Some online wags have dubbed it The Rampture, while others who live nearby refer to it ominously as “the next shoe to drop.”

Whatever you call it, the work is needed to construct sweeping, 30-foot-high flyover ramps that will improve traffic flow and safety at the perennially jammed intersection, as this Metro video explains. Currently, vehicles moving on and off the freeway must execute a complicated merge with heavy traffic on Wilshire—a situation the new flyover ramps are intended to alleviate.

The first of eight ramps to close will be the westbound Wilshire on-ramp to the northbound 405 and the northbound 405 off-ramp to westbound Wilshire. Both will be out of commission for 90 days starting June 22. Work on the other ramps will proceed in segments after that, with planned closures ranging from 90 days to 14 days. Delays and detours are expected as workers demolish and rebuild the ramps, working around the clock to finish the job.

Some preparatory work has already taken place.

In all, work on the Wilshire ramps is expected to take about a year.

Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky is set to appear with other officials at a news conference today, Friday, May 11, to present ways of coping with the extended closures.

The official mantra for getting through it all: Plan ahead. Adjust your travel times. Share the ride.

In other words, get ready for a long, blocked summer—and then some.

The June 22 start date was chosen, in part, because it will come after the end of the academic year for LAUSD and private schools in the area. The work also will be getting underway following the mid-June flurry of commencement activity at UCLA.

Meanwhile, Metro’s Commute Services Department is seizing the moment and hoping to help residents, workers and employers navigate the disruption, and, perhaps, discover some new ways of getting around that will outlast the temporary pain during construction.

Then, later in the summer, Carmageddon will make a return appearance. The weekend shutdown of the entire freeway is the flipside to last summer’s successful, shorter-than-expected closure required to demolish one side of the Mulholland Bridge. This summer, workers will tear down the other side of the bridge during Carmageddon II. A date for the sequel has not yet been announced.

When completed in 2013, the 405 Project is expected to expand and modernize the heavily-travelled stretch of freeway that runs through the Sepulveda Pass, from the 10 Freeway to the 101 Freeway. The $1.034 billion project will add a 10-mile northbound carpool lane along with lane and ramp improvements and three rebuilt, seismically reinforced bridges across the freeway.

Where giants collide: some of the heaviest traffic in the nation occurs where Wilshire and the 405 meet.

Posted 5/11/12

Good Samaritan's annual "Blessing of the Bikes" has become an L.A. Bike Week tradition.

Bicycles keep gaining traction in Los Angeles County. With the most recent edition of CicLAvia behind us, it’s time to celebrate pedal power during the 18^th Annual Bike Week, May 14-18. 

Metro, the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition and other community organizations are partnering for five days of bike festivities, beginning Monday with a 10 a.m. kick-off celebration at the University of Southern California’s Galen Center. New initiatives to promote bicycling will be announced at the event.

After that, on Tuesday, clergy of various religions will perform the 9^th Annual Blessing of the Bikes at Good Samaritan Hospital from 8 a.m. to 9:30 a.m. Cyclists who attend can also receive the earthly blessings of a free bike check-up and breakfast.

On Wednesday, cyclists can “test pedal” the new Expo Line bike lanes on a mid-city ride, which meets at the Expo Park/USC station at 8 a.m. and departs at 8:30 a.m.

Thursday, May 17, is Bike to Work Day. Metro and other local transit agencies will give free rides to anyone with a bike or a helmet, and local cycling organizations and businesses will host dozens of pit stops with free refreshments and giveaways. After the workday is over, participants can join fellow riders at one of several after parties.

The week concludes on Friday with Bike to School Day, which takes aim at reducing traffic congestion in school zones.

Bike Week will give the public 5 days’ worth of reasons to avoid the hassles of driving while getting some healthy exercise with L.A.’s growing cycling community. To keep safe on the roads, check out these quick tips from Metro.

Posted 5/9/12

Billboards like this represent the continuing collaboration between Metta World Peace and Los Angeles County.

“I was 110 percent wrong,” the suspended Laker says of decking an opposing player with a nasty elbow to the head. “People can say what they want. I’m not going to get down on myself because I made a mistake. I’m not perfect. But it’s not going to stop me from talking about mental health.”

And the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health suddenly has a teachable moment on its hands.

For more than a year, the player formerly known as Ron Artest has been in a very public partnership with the mental health department, appearing at high school assemblies and in public service announcements to encourage young people to be unafraid of seeking psychological treatment. Dozens of billboards and transit ads with World Peace’s picture, along with the NBA logo and the L.A. County seal, carry the catchphrase: “You can do it.”

The campaign was, in a sense, testimony to the public rehabilitation and redemption of Artest, who was famously suspended for 86 games for brawling with fans in the Detroit Piston’s arena in 2004 when he played for the Indiana Pacers. Last year, World Peace—who credits a team of therapists for helping him with everything from parenting skills to anger management—was honored with the NBA’s good citizenship award.

But on Sunday, April 22, that goodwill vanished the moment James Harden of the Oklahoma City Thunder crumpled to the hardwood of Staples Center. World Peace had been pounding his chest after a dunk when he let loose with a powerful round-house elbow behind the left ear of Harden, who’d come face-to face with the pumped-up Lakers forward.

This brutal elbow led to a seven game suspension.

In an a column for ESPN.com, former Lakers’ great Kareem Abdul-Jabbar put it like this: “In returning to his old ways, Metta has wasted all the goodwill, including the J. Walter Kennedy Citizenship Award, he earned when he was on his best behavior.” A sports columnist for the Orange County Register, Jeff Miller, was equally harsh, saying that World Peace had “tainted all the good things he has achieved in promoting mental health.”

But inside the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health, the view was decidedly more nuanced. Experts there emphasized that mental health recovery is a process often accompanied by relapse.

“When I saw what happened in the game, I thought, man, the adrenaline just got out of control,” said Dr. Marvin Southard, the department’s director. “It was an ugly event but it seemed to me that it was not purposeful, rather an artifact of the emotion of the moment.”

For all of us, Southard said, “our aspirations and desires to do the right thing don’t always live up 100 percent to our actions…It doesn’t happen all at once. The goal is for the actual self to get closer to the ideal self day by day.”

As for the agency’s partnership with World Peace, Southard said: “I don’t feel embarrassed that the department is connected to someone who makes a mistake. I don’t know who hasn’t made one.”

For his part, World Peace said in an interview with Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky’s website that the incident occurred simply because he got “over excited” after slamming down several dunks that reminded him of his performance as a younger player.

“I never thought I could reach that plateau again,” he said, adding: “It was pure excitement.”

World Peace said that, with his much improved game, he’s now working “all the time” with his therapist to keep from getting overtaken by emotion, as he did last month and in his earlier years. “She’s trying to show me how to play with less passion and still be effective.”

And that’s no easy lesson, he said, because this is “no kids’ game. I know people who throw more elbows than me. It doesn’t feel like a game to us. It feels like life or death.”

As he tries to reconcile the disconnect between his public image and his public mission, he can’t help feeling that he’s being judged more harshly than he should be in the situation.

“The only issue I have is people trying to single me out, trying to tarnish what I’m trying to do in the community. They try to destroy everything I’m working for.”

And those things, he said, “are bigger than basketball.”

Posted 5/8/12

Terry Bell, second from left, and fellow docents defended Kienholz's "Back Seat Dodge '38" in LACMA's early years.

Terry Bell was a 34-year-old homemaker with two children in Westwood when art changed her life.

“It was the early ‘60s, and I had a good friend who did fundraising for the museum,” she remembers. “One day she said, ‘You’re a disgrace! You’re a college graduate and you don’t know anything about painting or sculpture.’ ”

At her friend’s insistence, she signed up for a then-new program to train docents at the Los Angeles Museum of History, Science and Art in Exposition Park, which at the time housed the county’s art collection. Now, 50 years later, she is an avid art collector, a Los Angeles County Museum of Art life trustee and a founding member of one of the largest docent organizations in the nation. She has exposed thousands of visitors to museum treasures, recorded acoustic guides for major exhibitions and worked against the censorship of controversial and important artworks.

And she traces it all to that decision a half-century ago to volunteer as a LACMA docent..

“It is just so rewarding,” says Bell, who this week is among the hundreds of honorees celebrating the golden anniversary of LACMA’s Docent Council. “Not only in terms of yourself, but in what you can give back to the community.”

Some 521 men and women belong to the Docent Council, a volunteer juggernaut whose members have led more than 2 million children and adults through the museum since it became an official entity in 1962.

More than a million Southern California schoolchildren have been led on field trips by LACMA docents; so have generations of adult visitors to the museum’s many exhibitions.

“We are definitely in the front lines,” says Judith Tuch, who chairs the council. “We provide the personal connection between the students and adults who come to the museum and the art they see. For many, it’s the first time they’ve ever been in a museum. For some, unfortunately, it may be the only time they’ll be in a museum.

“We encourage them to understand that this is a county museum, and that this is their place.”

The council grew from a small group of volunteers who explained art during the 1950s at what is now the Natural History Museum. Though visitors at that Exposition Park site mostly came to see dinosaurs and fossils, the county also had quietly been amassing fine art since the 1920s. Members of the Junior League, the Volunteer League of the San Fernando Valley and other local organizations offered informal tours of the gifts from such early donors as William Preston Harrison, Paul Rodman Mabury and William Randolph Hearst.

In 1961, amid planning for a separate Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Wilshire Boulevard, the groups joined forces to create a formal docent training program. Fifty-three women took the special classes in art history and elementary education. 

After a provisional year, the Docent Council was officially formed, chaired by Glenn Cooper, a Junior Leaguer who later became a well-known arts patron in Sun Valley. Their goal: To train 200 docents in time for the official opening of LACMA in 1965.

The docents were key almost from the moment the new museum opened. In 1966, for instance, they rose to defend Edward Kienholz’s still-controversial “Back Seat Dodge ’38.” The piece, which depicts a beer-soaked encounter in a parked car, is so sexually charged that members of the then-Board of Supervisors denounced it as pornographic.

“I had met Ed Kienholz and talked to him about the exhibition, and I thought it was terrific,” Bell remembers. 

Click here to view the embedded video.

The piece—like later Kienholz exhibitions that Bell also guided—became a sensation and visitors mobbed the museum. “Five or six of us guided tours every 20 minutes,” Bell remembers, “almost around the clock.”

Since then, the council has grown along with the county in diversity and sophistication. Some 25 members are men and docents of all races, creeds, ages and backgrounds lead tours in multiple languages.

Now overseen by the museum’s Education Department, the group has a training regimen that includes extensive coursework in art history and touring techniques and a 2-year provisional period. No member can tour adults without spending at least 5 years doing school tours.

“We have several attorneys in the current [provisional] class,” says Patsy Palmer, a child psychotherapist and longtime LACMA volunteer who now trains incoming docents. “One man in my group is a retired doctor.” All the new docents, she says, “are highly qualified and uniquely skilled.”

“We’ve come so far,” agrees Bell, who says she can’t wait to see how visitors respond to “Levitated Mass” and other upcoming attractions. “We’re really in a marvelous place.”

LACMA docent Patsy Palmer has shown the museum to legions of children. The Docent Council turns 50 this week.

Posted 5/2/12

Glossy green floors, dramatic mirrors, Dyson hand dryers and LED lighting are all part of the re-do.

With legendary headliners ranging from Glen Campbell to Smokey Robinson to Plácido Domingo on the 2012 bill, it’s not easy for a newcomer to break through at the Hollywood Bowl.

But it’s a safe bet that the new restrooms designed by Rios Clementi Hale Studios will have audiences cheering when they make their Bowl debut this summer.

Patrons will move toward the light in the men's room.

With sustainable features like Dyson hand dryers, LED lighting, water-saving fixtures, graphics inspired by the Bowl’s Art Deco architecture, and glossy green floors intended to bring the outdoors in, the restrooms represent a stark departure from the old, dark spaces that used to make intermission such a drab interlude.

The Bowl is a Los Angeles County park—albeit one with a worldwide reputation for glamour, fireworks and star-studded concerts—and the $3 million makeover was funded by Proposition A park improvement funds.

The bathrooms also feature reengineered layouts, dramatic mirrors, new privacy partitions between urinals and lighting accents to make sure patrons keep moving toward unoccupied facilities in the back, rather than creating unnecessary bottlenecks at the front of the line.

The new facilities were unveiled Monday evening at a Bowl reception along with some less noticeable but equally important off-season improvements like $600,000 in concrete repairs, including the replacement of a stairway built in 1954. Also underway, and expected to be finished in coming weeks, is the $2 million replacement of the moving sidewalk (also known as a speed ramp) that helps 75% of Bowl patrons get up the hill to their seats.

If you’d like to test drive the new and improved Bowl—and listen to some world-class music while you’re at it—tickets are on sale now. The season gets off to a big start June 22, with opening night festivities hosted by Julie Andrews and featuring Reba McIntyre, Chaka Khan and the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra conducted by Thomas Wilkins.

Julie Smith-Clementi of Rios Clementi Hale, outside one of the Bowl bathrooms redesigned by her firm.

Posted 5/7/12

Assessor's equipment shared space in this storage facility with the landlord's car, bikes and mattresses.

As Los Angeles County was tightening its belt in recent years, its assessor’s office was sitting on a cache of more than a half-million dollars’ worth of brand-new electronics equipment it had stockpiled but never used, a newly-released county audit found.

The auditors discovered some $654,000 worth of never-used equipment, ranging from laptops to laser jet printers, languishing in storage at the Hall of Administration after it was purchased between fiscal years 2001-2 and 2009-10.

“A lot of the equipment was still brand-new, still sealed with the original vendor tape,” said David Aldava, an intermediate accountant-auditor who was part of the team that looked into technology in the assessor’s office.

Aldava’s team also made another unusual discovery: The department had improperly stashed pallets loaded with other computers, printers and tech equipment—some still functioning, some headed to the junk pile—in an unlocked, leased storage facility in Signal Hill, where the county-owned equipment shared space with the landlord’s car, bicycles, refrigerators, mattresses and even a bar sign or two.

The equipment ended up in the storage facility—next to the assessor’s South District office—after employees initially told auditors that the department had no surplus electronics. Eventually, though, the staff “told us that they had previously moved the surplus items from other locations to the storage building in an attempt to hide the equipment from us,” according to an April 13 report from Auditor-Controller Wendy Watanabe.

In a response to the audit filed last month, the department concurred with virtually all of the auditor’s 25 recommendations, most aimed at tightening accountability, record-keeping and security and ensuring that IT equipment is purchased only when needed.

Assessor’s spokesman Louis Reyes said the office is “fully cooperating” in correcting problems uncovered in the audit. “The assessor wants to address these concerns fully,” he said.

Assessor John R. Noguez was elected in November, 2010, and was not in charge during the period in which the new equipment was stockpiled, Reyes noted.

The audit comes as a separate, broader review, ordered by the Board of Supervisors, is underway to examine how the assessor’s office operates across the board. The office has come under fire for allegedly granting preferential treatment to some property owners. Noguez also shocked the supervisors recently when he disclosed a large, unprecedented disparity in property tax projections that could leave the county with a $50 million hole in its budget.

The technology audit, conducted last year and provided to the Board of Supervisors last month, offered its own set of unexpected discoveries.

“This warehouse issue really took us by surprise,” Watanabe said—especially when employees initially refused to let the auditors into the Signal Hill facility, claiming it would take a month to reach the landlord and get his permission for access. “That really piqued our interest.”

It turned out that an effort was underway, apparently, to thwart auditors from discovering an abundance of surplus equipment, which is not allowed under county policy. “They started to dump everything to Signal Hill…We finally did get in and saw stacks and stacks of used computers,” Watanabe said. “They didn’t want us to see it, to cover up that they’d initially lied.”

Even as the used computer equipment was piling up, the department was also acquiring the stacks of new and unneeded electronics—apparently part of a use-it-or-lose strategy of spending IT funds at the end of fiscal years rather than allowing unspent money to revert to the Chief Executive Office’s overall county budget, the audit found.

Beyond the cost of the equipment itself, the department overpaid by not waiting to buy the items until they were actually needed. Because technology prices tend to decrease over time, the assessor’s office ended up paying at least $93,000 more than it should have, the audit found.

Despite the huge build-up in excess tech equipment being stored, the assessor’s office still had plenty of electronic devices to go around, it appears. The audit found that 324 of the department’s 1,425 employees had at least two computers assigned to them—and 57 had three or more.

“To us, this is just ridiculous,” Watanabe said. “There’s really no business reason to justify why someone would have three or more computers.”

The employees themselves admitted as much to county auditors when asked about those second or third computers.

“Oh, yeah, it’s just sitting in my trunk,” some said when questioned about laptops they’d been issued, according to Watanabe.

Having an unused laptop lying around the house or car has hidden costs, too, Watanabe said, since the county pays virtual network fees of $600 a year for each employee who logs onto the network from outside the office—whether a device is being used or not.

Then there were security lapses. The audit said that the assessor’s department disposed of some surplus equipment without first erasing county information from the devices’ hard drives. It also found that 22% of the department’s computers didn’t have any working anti-virus protection.

Although Watanabe said no fraud was uncovered, the audit found a system of lax controls and a cavalier attitude toward safeguarding county property.

As for the surplus devices stashed in Signal Hill, those have all been junked or donated since the audit, or will be soon, according to the department. And employees in the assessor’s office have begun working their way through that unused stockpile of new equipment.

Electronic devices belonging to the Assessor's Office were discovered in this storage facility.

Posted /3/12

The Expo Line rolled into the record books, as the initial phase of the light rail was formally opened on Friday, April 27.

It will run at first between downtown Los Angeles and the La Cienega/Jefferson station, with an opening of the line’s Culver City station planned in coming weeks. The 8.6-mile line was inaugurated with a flourish—complete with tunes from the USC Marching Band, the appearance of huggable T-Rex from the county Natural History Museum, confetti cannons and free rides during Expo’s opening weekend.

Dignitaries including Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, chair of the Expo Board, celebrated the historic nature of the occasion, as the first light rail trains since the Red Car made tracks for the Westside. A second phase of the line, which will run to Santa Monica, is now underway.

Posted 5/2/12