Bell fiasco shows what happens without watchdog

I am too far away from the Bell, Calif., pay scandal to offer detailed insights into how that public travesty occurred, but one important observation is clear.

Bell has no regular local newspaper.

The 35,000-population Los Angeles suburb is one of hundreds of towns in the sprawling L.A. metropolitan area. The weekly Industrial Post, founded in the 1920s, served the community until the mid-80s, whence began a series of newspaper consolidations that eventually diluted the newspaper into nonexistence. Today, Bell is one of dozens of communities served by the weekly Los Angeles Wave.

"Bell is kind of a sleepy little town. Nothing much happens there," The Wave's managing editor, Don Wanlass told me Wednesday. So, nothing much got covered there. With staffing restrictions familiar to newspapers of all stripes these days, The Wave has to spread its resources judiciously, and that means, Wanlass said, that Bell was one of about 25 communities assigned to a single reporter.

Obviously, that one reporter couldn't get to every town meeting on his vast beat, so he focused on the bigger towns where The Wave has more circulation. Unless there was a specific reason to get to Bell - and until the L.A. Times stumbled across the salaries of the Bell city officials, there rarely was - the reporter didn't get there.

"We've been to the last three (Bell City Council) meetings now," Wanlass said. "That's about three more meetings than we'd been to there in the past five years."

In such a news vacuum, the public officials of Bell had little problem hiding their greed from voters. They set up elaborate schemes for paying themselves that wouldn't raise any alarms, they discouraged potential election challengers from even filing to oppose them and they took advantage of an astonishingly low voter turnout. The vote on structural issues that enabled Bell officials to get around pay restrictions attracted only 400 voters.

And, if someone did get suspicious and try to take a look at public records? Wanlass said when the paper once tried to file a Freedom of Information request with Bell officials on another matter, the officials said, "Sure. But the copy fee will be $475." The Los Angeles Times was not so intimidated by such nonsense, and when - in the process of covering a different story about why Bell would be supplying police and other services for a cash-strapped neighboring town that had fired nearly its entire municipal work force - its reporters came calling, Bell produced the records that led to the current firestorm.

Wanlass noted that as a result of the controversy, The Wave and other neighborhood papers throughout the L.A. area are suddenly focusing a lot more on the pay of local officials, but we all know that attention won't last forever if it's not a part of the fabric of everyday community life.

This is one reason the Daily Herald is so dogged about getting pay and contract information for local municipal and school officials. It's why we ask about their pay, their perks and their pensions when they are hired, get raises or depart, and it's why we use whatever laws we can to get the information when officials balk.

I suspect that if Bell had faced such scrutiny and if it had an electorate that cared enough about local government to read about it, their city manager would never have been paid an $800,000 annual salary nor their part-time city council members figures in the range of $100,000 a year.

You can bet the Daily Herald is keeping an eye on such things, so if any of your local officials try to take home such an eye-popping paycheck, at least you'll know about it.

Jim Slusher, jslusher@dailyherald.com, is an assistant managing editor at the Daily Herald.