WHO'S IN CHARGE OF L.A.'S EFFORTS TO GET, TRACK FUNDS?

Byline: Beth Barrett Staff Writer

It took Phoenix a day to do what the city of Los Angeles needed about two months to do - provide a detailed and understandable breakout of the federal and state funds it receives each year.

Mayor James Hahn's staff conceded Los Angeles has never done a detailed regional analysis to determine how federal grants are distributed to the San Fernando Valley and other communities in the city.

The geographical information wasn't provided, either, to the county Local Agency Formation Commission, which was forced to use broad estimates and other assumptions in assessing future grant funds in an analysis of Valley and Hollywood cityhood.

After the Daily News filed a California Public Records Act request, it took staff members 2 1/2 weeks to produce a partial document showing federal grant totals - without the Valley breakout.

The Daily News did get cooperation from individual departments, which allowed the newspaper to piece together its own analysis of the federal breakout.

Once that analysis was completed, City Administrative Officer William Fujioka provided a team of analysts who reviewed the documents, and concluded they were accurate, with a couple of minor revisions that did not affect the overall conclusions.

Phoenix provided more detailed grant information in a day, breaking out all of its funds by source and program.

Deputy Mayor Carmel Sella said the Mayor's Office could only provide regional breakouts to ``the extent practicable,'' and provided no timetable, turning the matter over to the CAO's office.

Sella said federal grants dealing with hiring police could be ``difficult to analyze on a geographic basis.'' The mayor's budget contains about $40 million in federal funds earmarked for hiring more cops, but Hahn's staff was unable to say how much of the money has been spent.

Senior administrative analyst Laura Guglielmo said most of the grant money for new police is being used to pay salaries, and would be proportional to where in the city new recruits were assigned. That indicates the Valley, with a disproportionately low share of officers, would get a smaller share of those funds per capita.

The Daily News also found Los Angeles has no central system for tracking grant funds, nor any person responsible for making sure departments are aggressively going after federal and state dollars.

Aurora Abracia, a city chief administrative analyst, said there ``isn't one place that's a clearing place for all grants,'' attributing it to the large size of the city.

Abracia said each department is ``in the best position to track'' its own money.