Bill to aid teachers questioned

SACRAMENTO —  A legislator whose wife was one of thousands of teachers issued erroneous paychecks by the Los Angeles Unified School District last year seeks to punish its leaders and force the district to pay the taxes on its overpayments.

Ethics watchdogs say that is a conflict of interest for the lawmaker, Assemblyman Tony Mendoza (D-Artesia).

Mendoza said that when the system went haywire last year, it overpaid his wife by an amount still under dispute, then didn’t pay her at all for two months. Last fall, the district sent her a letter saying that she owed it $9,000, he said, then later estimated that she owed $2,700.

The payroll troubles, Mendoza said, cost him several hundred dollars in erroneous taxes.

He has introduced legislation that would reimburse him and others affected by the payroll problems for those taxes, but he is not doing it for the sake of his household finances, he said.

“My bill mostly wants to give teachers peace of mind that somebody’s looking out for them,” Mendoza said.

His bill, AB 2481, would cover secretaries, teachers aides, cafeteria workers and other district employees, in addition to teachers. Originally, it would have affected only teachers, but Mendoza amended it Tuesday.

Government ethics experts say Mendoza’s authorship of the legislation, which also would suspend the pay of district superintendents, assistants and the school board as long as the district’s payroll error rate exceeds 1%, is legal but doesn’t look good.

“I certainly would have advised him not to be carrying the bill, because this is too personal for him,” said Robert Stern, president of the Center for Governmental Studies, a nonprofit group in Los Angeles. “He’s using his position to affect his income.”

Mendoza said he drafted the legislation out of frustration with his wife’s experience. Because thousands of other school employees share her plight, he said, there is no conflict of interest.

“It would be a conflict if it benefited me and not anyone else,” said Mendoza.

State regulations allow elected officials to vote on matters that affect their pocketbooks if many other people would be affected in a similar manner. And state law permits public officials to make decisions about pay for employees of government agencies -- such as the school district -- even if it affects a family member.

Last year, technical trouble and human error proved disastrous in the district’s launch of a new payroll system. Some 36,000 employees, most of them teachers, were overpaid, and thousands were underpaid or not paid at all.

The debacle hurt the credit ratings of some teachers and forced many to spend hours resolving their problem. School officials acknowledged this month that they will have to borrow millions of dollars to make the payroll system work, and they have agreed to give 8% interest for six months to teachers who were underpaid.

Though the district has promised to pay the state and federal taxes on overpayments to many employees, about 3,700 who did not agree to pay back an amount determined by the district are at risk of being responsible for those taxes. That group includes Mendoza’s wife, Leticia, an East Los Angeles elementary school teacher.

Mendoza’s billwould force the district to pay taxes on all employees’ overpayments, including his wife’s.

“They are the ones who didn’t fix it before the end of the year,” Mendoza said.

Mendoza’s bill would also allow workers to be paid for time and travel costs when they visit district headquarters to straighten out their compensation.

David Holmquist, the district’s interim chief operating officer, said the payroll system’s error rate in 2008 has been less than 1%. He called Mendoza’s bill unnecessary.

“It’s not going to help us to do any better than we’re doing now,” said Holmquist, “and it’s going to require us to do things that we’re already doing anyway and have already done.”

The teachers’ union, United Teachers Los Angeles, supports Mendoza’s bill.

It could face its first vote as early as Wednesday in the Assembly Education Committee.

Another bill inspired by the district’s payroll troubles, AB 730 by Assemblyman Kevin De Leon (D-Los Angeles), would affect companies that have seriously bungled information-technology contracts for public agencies. It would block them from bidding on state and local government contracts for at least five years.

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nancy.vogel@latimes.com