A Los Angeles City Councilmember remains silent in the face of a growing chorus of calls for him to disclose specifics on how hundreds of thousands of dollars in public money gathered through a special fund under his control have been spent in recent years.
The money flows to the office of 14th District Los Angeles City Councilmember Jose Huizar from the Central Los Angeles Recycling & Transfer Station (CLARTS), which is located on the 2200 block of E. Washington Boulevard on the eastern edge of Downtown, where workers of the city's Bureau of Sanitation sort trash before it is shipped to landfills. The CLARTS Fund collects a share of revenue from fees charged to private trash haulers.
The original terms of the fund — which came into existence prior to Huizar's election in 2005 — called for the money to be spent for constituent amenities within the territory of the 14th District as a way to offset the downsides of the refuse station.
It remains unclear whether those terms have been changed in recent years, and calls to Huizar's office for this story were not returned.
Huizar's silence also makes it difficult to determine how much money is currently in the fund, although recent reports in The Voice, a community newspaper in the El Sereno district on the Eastside, indicated a total of more than $400,000 as recently as 2007. The Voice also reported that Huizar has made no public accounting of any spending from the CLARTS fund in the three years since then, offering only "non-committal" and "vague" responses when questioned by constituents at a recent community meeting.
E-mails obtained by the Garment & Citizen indicate that representatives of Huizar acknowledged more than four months ago that documents detailing spending from the CLARTS Fund are public records and subject to public scrutiny — but they have not released them. The e-mails indicate that an initial acknowledgement came on February 25 in response to a request from Carlos Morales, editor of The Voice. Ana Cubas, who currently serves as Huizar's chief of staff, said the council office would need 30 days to respond to Morales' request.
That timeline has come and gone with no disclosure. A more recent request for the records by the Garment & Citizen has drawn no response from Huizar's office.
The desire to see documents that account for how the funds have been spent goes beyond the local media, too.
"Show us the money," said Jose Aguilar, a member of the Boyle Heights Neighborhood Council who will soon assume the presidency of the body.
Aguilar said the Boyle Heights Neighborhood Council could soon consider a resolution calling for a disclosure of how the CLARTS funds have been spent. Aguilar said the Boyle Heights Neighborhood Council is often asked to use portions of its $45,000-a-year budget to fund various neighborhood programs. He said he'd like to see a matching-funds approach, where the office of the 14th District and the neighborhood council would make similar contributions.
"There are a lot of needs, and we have to be creative in trying to meet them," Aguilar said. "But we can't come up with many creative solutions unless we know what resources are available."
Aguilar said the lack of response to media inquiries has many members of the community making "suppositions" that Huizar has spent CLARTS funds outside the 14th District.
A representative of the Los Angeles County District Attorney's office said that no city, county, or state agency can compel Huizar to release the records. Current law requires an individual or organization to file a lawsuit seeking the release of the records, according to the District Attorney's office.
Update: Huizar chief of staff Cubas referred all inquiries on expenditures from the CLARTS Fund to the office of the Los Angeles City Clerk just prior to the posting of this story at labeez.org.
Photo of Jose Aguilar from the L.A. Garmetn & Citizen.
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