Consulting Dr. No on Fiscal Waste, Fraud and Abuse

With the Mel Gibson movie doing so well, Easter will be really, really big this year, and lots of people are looking at the world and at themselves and asking, WWJD -- What Would Jesus Do?

Being more secular a sinner myself, I’m looking at the world too, and asking almost the same thing: WWJD -- What Would Joel Do?

Joel is Joel Wachs, a onetime Los Angeles city councilman who was so tight with the tax buck that the mayor’s staff called him Dr. No.

He’s the one who threatened billionaires to make sure that you and I didn’t fork over our pork to build their football stadium. He’s the one who pointed out that the legal pad he could buy across the street from City Hall for less than a quarter wound up costing $1.80 by the time it crossed the street to City Hall.

His was one of two “nay” votes on putting $90 million in public money toward that swanky Hollywood and Highland development. Now the place has been sold for less than a third of what it cost, and the city owns the parking garage, which has been losing a half-million dollars a year. And anybody who can LOSE money on a parking garage in L.A. is a world-class financial moron.

Joel Wachs now runs the Andy Warhol Foundation in New York -- Warhol is the artist whose painting of 200 $1 bills sold for $385,000 -- and I was thinking about Wachs as I perused the papers and kept seeing two kinds of civic fiscal outrages in California.

No. 1 is the money that won’t be spent anymore, items cut off the new state budget.

Expect Third World waits at health clinics, nature centers closed to our species, libraries closed to everyone. This budget devastates, one Californian at a time, but it’s nickel-and-dime stuff compared with the price tag of your average stealth fighter, which isn’t in the budget. But then, neither are taxes on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s rich friends -- “rich” being the real unspeakable four-letter word in this time and place. What, he’s worried about being cut from their Christmas card lists?

No. 2 is how the state spends the money they’ll still be spending.

Sometimes it’s just the cost of doing business. Just as two aspirin in the hospital cost three dollars more than a whole bottle in the store, to pay for the doctor who tells you you need them, the machine that beeps when it’s time to take them, and the nurse who delivers them ... by the same token, some of the $1.80 for a two-bit legal pad goes to a decent paycheck for the guy who hauls it off the truck, schleps it into the office, stacks it in a cupboard.

But some programs tend to run on budget autopilot, and when you ask why, you get the kind of answer you got when you asked your dad something he couldn’t answer: “Because I say so, that’s why.”

Some are relics, just like the law prohibiting shooting buffalo from the rear of a moving train. My old colleague Margaret Talev wrote in the Sacramento Bee that the Assembly still budgets a thousand bucks a year, automatically, for telegraph services. How quaint. Any money set aside for replacing spittoons? Great stuff for Leno, but that single, silly budgetary dinosaur would pay for a hundred hours of at-home care for some crippled child.

And some practices ought to account for themselves. In Los Angeles, eight out of 10 calls to the Fire Department aren’t about fires but about chest pains or slip-and-falls, so I have to ask, why does a fire engine seem to have to tag along on every paramedic call? Is this some union turf thing? Are there two paramedics who have to travel separately, like the Queen of England and her heir? Why not a lawyer showing up with the cops at every crime scene, because someone will need legal counsel?

I’d hoped Arnold Schwarzenegger would have kept to his promise to cut billions by sussing out official waste, fraud and abuse -- unless he thinks healthcare and libraries ARE wasteful, fraudulent and abusive.

But since he’s backed away from running rigid audits, there’s been about as much hunting for real WFA [waste, fraud and abuse] as O.J. Simpson has conducted for the real killer, or Schwarzenegger for the real groper.

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Joel Wachs was about to get on the subway with his $21-a-week go-anywhere pass, but he called me back first. Sure, he remembers the battles for accountability in the city’s “procurement practices,” which sounds like it has something to do with pimping, and I wouldn’t argue too hard against that sometimes.

People in City Hall would buttonhole him and say, “ ‘You’re right, you’re right, but I don’t want to get the fallout.’ ... It’s easier [for them] not to deal with it.”

Refusing to acknowledge what is unnecessary makes it harder to protect what is necessary. Conversely, says Wachs, “the quickest way to convince someone that they should pay for something is to convince them that what they’re already paying is being spent wisely.”

Most often the protection came from the top; it was the mid-level employees who’d come knocking at Wachs’ office door with suggestions to save money and time. “They took pride in doing the job well and in saving money, but they sometimes came up against the same obstacles we did -- people in their own departments who didn’t want them to upset the apple cart.”

And with that, off Wachs went, into the core of the Big Apple. A shame he isn’t around here anymore; maybe we could use him to upset the whole produce stand.

Patt Morrison’s e-mail address is patt.morrison@ latimes.com. Her previous columns can be read at latimes.com/morrison.