Public Has Eye on ‘Wasteful’ O.C. Spending

In Huntington Beach, David Sullivan regularly scolded the previous City Council for its “wasteful” spending and, just as frequently, the council majority dismissed his criticisms. But last November, the city’s voters bought into Sullivan’s crusade against waste and elected him to the council.

In Mission Viejo, the City Council proposed building an $18-million City Hall. Some residents protested that it was, in their words, a “Taj Mahal”--too big and too expensive. The proposal went on the June ballot, and voters overwhelmingly rejected it.

At the county government level, Orange County supervisors gave themselves a 4% pay raise, even though they were in the process of eliminating 260 county jobs and were grappling with a $67.7-million budget shortfall, the worst ever. A roar of citizen protest erupted. Within a week, the supervisors reversed themselves and rescinded their pay hike.

From the Hall of Administration to city halls across the county, increasingly watchful taxpayers are targeting what they perceive to be waste and unnecessary spending. The result has been the most sweeping populist revolution in local government since the 1970s, according to William R. Mitchell, chairman of the Orange County chapter of Common Cause.

“I haven’t seen this intensity of increased awareness (of government) since the Watergate days,” says Mitchell, who attributes it to a growing public sense that “government isn’t delivering the goods and services the public would like,” and citizens have become increasingly familiar with public policy procedures.

Some political activists say last year’s run for the presidency by billionaire populist Ross Perot became a catalyst for government reform, much as Howard Jarvis’ drive to enact California’s Proposition 13 triggered a tax revolt that swept the country.

“You’ve really got to consider what Perot did,” said Ray Harbour, an Orange County businessman and spokesman for the Taxpayers’ Action Network, the organization that led the successful fight to get the Orange County Board of Supervisors to rescind its pay raise.

Harbour said Perot’s organization opened local campaign offices across the country, giving people opposed to government waste a host of places to group together. “Perot really woke people up with his campaign, and he got people involved,” Harbour said. “In a recession, there are a lot of unhappy people; they don’t like to see waste in government at a time when people are losing their jobs.”

Sullivan, the newly elected Huntington Beach councilman, said he similarly found that voters were fed up. “People were telling me they didn’t like what was going on at City Hall, especially with such things as excessive pay raises for city staff and spiking of pension benefits,” Sullivan said.

Local governments also caught it from above. State officials last year accused some cities, including Huntington Beach, of allowing retiring city employees to claim improperly large pensions through questionable accounting practices that included payment for unused vacation days with final-year salary, the key factor in computing retirement pay.

This pension inflation is called spiking, and Sullivan frequently criticized the practice when he was president of the citizens group, Huntington Beach Tomorrow.

In many cities, fiscal critics such as Sullivan previously commanded scant attention. But as California suffered through the longest recession in its history, many formerly unconcerned citizens became more interested in their local governments.

“I think the recession had a great deal to do with it,” Sullivan said. “In these recessionary times, I think people generally perceived that their city government wasn’t doing enough to tighten its belt. People were out there struggling to make it on their own budget, and then they saw excessive spending practices by city government. They became really concerned.”

In Mission Viejo, where the fight over excessive city spending focused on plans for a new City Hall, Gary Manley, chairman of the Citizens Action Committee of Mission Viejo, said the City Council’s plans were too grandiose.

“It was four times the size of the present City Hall,” Manley said in a recent interview. “There was no justification for it. It was another cost we couldn’t afford.”

Manley said he sees that beyond the city limits of Mission Viejo, there is an overall pattern of fiscal inefficiency in many local governments.

“I think the real issue is that government has failed to plan where money is coming from. The (federal) government’s answer is just to borrow more money,” he said. The problem, however, is that “people at the local level can’t print more money like the federal government does,” Manley said. Their only recourse is to cut out wasteful or excessive spending.

While citizen protests have triggered some of the money-spending rollbacks, there have also been some internal actions on city councils.

In Tustin, city government in December cracked down on credit cards after complaints were raised about police commanders using city cards to charge $12,000 worth of meals.

In Anaheim, the travel budget for the City Council was cut in half during the past three fiscal years. In 1991, the council’s travel budget was $20,584 compared to $8,386 this year. “This account has been trimmed by more than 50 percent,” said Mary Foss, the management assistant for the City Council. “Some of the reduction is due to the current economic situation.”

In Costa Mesa, Councilwoman Sandra L. Genis raised questions about how much city government was spending for meals for the council, staff and committees. Genis, who is now the mayor, said she was “amazed” at the city’s expenses in previous years for meals.

“They spent gobs of money in some of the old budgets,” Genis said. “It was something like $10,000 to $15,000 (a year). I was shocked at how much it was. I was thinking, who was eating this stuff?”

In response to Genis’ complaints about the spending, the council last year cut the city meal budget to the current $6,000 and eliminated meals for city committees.

In some cities, the amount spent by city councils for meeting-day meals is still excessive, according to some residents.

In Dana Point, for instance, some eyebrows were raised at disclosures that the city had been spending about $7,000 annually the past two years for meals for its council members. Some critics of the council questioned the cost.

“I think it’s outrageous,” said Bonnie Streeter, a city activist frequently at odds with the council. “It’s beyond bad taste; it’s obscene.”

Huntington Beach’s City Council became the target of citizen complaints in 1990 when it became known that the council was dining, before council meetings, on $5,000 worth of china. City Administrator Michael T. Uberuaga ordered the china returned and got a refund. Like councils in some other cities, Huntington Beach’s city officials start meetings in the afternoons and continue through to 11 p.m. or later. The taxpayer-provided meals are literally working suppers, council officials have pointed out.

“I consider the meals we get more of an accommodation than a perk,” said Huntington Beach Councilman Jim Silva. “We’re still working when we eat. For instance, we get a briefing on contract negotiations or a legal matter while we’re eating our supper. And the meals are nothing fancy--one night it was hamburgers and malts.”

In some cities, citizen outrage has been directed at travel and expense-account spending. Cutbacks and tighter controls have resulted.

In Garden Grove, the City Council earlier this year ended its controversial practice of paying travel expenses for the mayor’s wife, in addition to the mayor’s, to conventions and other out-of-town events approved by the council.

Garden Grove officials became so sensitive about travel expenses that city employees are paying their own expenses to conventions, even when the convention business is directly related to city government.

For instance, Deborah Schoch, the city’s supervisor of sports and aquatics, plans to attend the 45th Annual California and Pacific Southwest Recreation and Parks Conference in San Francisco March 11-14. The city will pay her $160 registration fee, but she will pay the $550 estimated cost of her transportation, lodging and food.

Garden Grove City Manager George Tindall similarly will be paying all of his expenses, including registration, when he attends the City Managers Department Annual Meeting in Monterey Feb. 10-12.

But while cutback examples can be cited by many local governments, citizen activists say more needs to be done.

Just last week, for instance, fiscal militants in Cypress bristled at the City Council’s plans to attend a “retreat” outside the city, at taxpayer expense. City officials defended the proposal, but a continuing dispute appears likely.

Mitchell, the Orange County chairman of Common Cause, said the resurgence of citizen questioning about budgets and spending is a welcome event for local democracy. He said he hopes the pressure ultimately leads to reforms of governmental process--not just governmental spending.

“Politicians sometimes reduce some spending as a symbolic gesture--to placate some of the public outcry for change,” Mitchell said. “Something like that doesn’t really change the institution or structure of government. What I am hoping for is continuing action so that we’ll eventually get real reform in government.”