Los Angeles City Controller Wendy Greuel’s mayoral campaign released its first television ad yesterday to promote the work she has done.
She says she has identified $160 million in waste. But it turns out that numbers are a tricky thing.
The 30-second spot is the first TV ad in this year's mayoral campaign – and it immediately drew criticism from one of Ms. Greuel’s opponents.
“As city controller, I found $160 million in waste and fraud – your tax dollars squandered,” Ms. Greuel says in the ad. “As mayor, I can stop the waste because I know where it is.”
On her campaign website, Ms. Greuel, who was elected controller in 2009, identifies a total of $175 million in what she calls “wasteful spending, fraudulent activity and abuse of city resources.”
Before the campaign released the ad to the media, Eric Garcetti’s campaign cried foul. A statement from the Garcetti campaign argued that as controller, Ms. Greuel found $96.7 million in waste – a figure the controller's own website seems to back up.
Statements from 2010, 2011 and 2012 indicated that Greuel's audits identified a total of $96.5 million. So, why the discrepancy with the $175 million figure on her campaign website and the $160 million number in the ad?
The Wendy Greuel mayoral campaign says her audit on street furniture identified $80 million in lost funds. Not quite. The audit (and a year-end statement) found that the city lost $23.1 million. The report warned that L.A. could miss another $57 million without a contract amendment, but it didn't identify that figure as money the city lost or squandered.
An audit of the Real Property Trust Fund found a loss of $7 million. (A year-end report on the controller’s performance backs up that figure.) The Greuel campaign website inflates that figure to $24 million. One possible explanation: The controller’s audit found that over a 12-year period, $25 million that could have gone into the city’s General Fund went instead to Council members’ discretionary accounts.
So, what's a couple of million here and there?
Ms. Walton of KPCC-FM (89.3) is also The City Maven, and she may be contacted at awalton@scpr.org
