As the city of Los Angeles struggles to find funds to provide safe, welcoming parks and recreation facilities, City Controller Wendy Greuel has discovered that the Dept. of Recreation and Parks has spent more than $2 million in public monies to operate three campgrounds that have been closed to the public for more than 10 years.
These findings, she said, followed a complaint to the controller’s Fraud, Waste and Abuse hotline.
“At a time when the city’s budget situation has limited the services that Recreation and Parks provides, I urge leaders to decide if maintaining these shuttered, unused campgrounds are a priority,” said Ms. Greuel, a candidate for Mayor in next March’s election. “Without a plan in place, wasting more than $2 million on campgrounds no resident can use is unacceptable.”
The controller’s investigation revealed:
• While Camp Valcrest and Camp Radford have been closed to the public for 20 years and 13 years, respectively, the city has paid $2 million for caretakers to live at the camps.
• The city has paid nearly $100,000 for water to be trucked up to Camp Valcrest.
• The Wildlands Conservancy offered to pay $616,000 to cover repairs at Camp Valcrest. However, Parks and Rec failed to meet the contingency demands. Two years later, the Conservancy withdrew their offer.
The department maintains that it cannot open and operate the parks until all repairs needed are completed. Though there is a plan to reopen Camp Radford, there is currently no timeline to do so. The stated reason: Lack of identified funding.
Ms. Greuel said Parks and Rec paid $217,000 for the purchase and installation of a mobile home at Decker Canyon Camp. The department never obtained the proper permits for installation and realized after the purchase that the road to the camp was unable to accommodate the mobile home for installation.
Instead of discontinuing monthly lease payments during the three-year term based on the failure to obtain permits, the department had to store and ultimately demolish the mobile home after 10 years because it had deteriorated so badly.
“This is another example of a department that did not keep a close watch over each and every expenditure,” Ms. Greuel said. “The city cannot afford to continue on with a business as usua’ attitude. They must ask the difficult questions to allocate the ity’s resources most effectively.”
In the last three years, Ms. Greuel has conducted more than 60 audits and discovered $130 million the city of Los Angeles has lost to wasteful spending and abuse of city resources.
Ms. Greuel may be contacted at http://controller.lacity.org.
To report waste, fraud or abuse, call 866.428.1514.
For a copy of Controller Greuel’s letter to Parks and Rec, click here.
