Parachini says he was fired because the court didn't like his openness

Allan Parachini was a rarity in the world of government affairs: He was helpful. That very quality appears to be the thing that did him in as PIO for the Los Angeles County court system. While accusing Parachini of leaking information to the celebrity-gossip site TMZ (which embarrasses celebrities), court officials seem to have been more concerned with Parachini's efforts to make public information available to the public (which has the potential to embarrass court officials), according to today's Los Angeles Times story.

Parachini got fired this week after eight years on the job. The Times story indicates that court officials got fed up with him after he failed to find excuses to drag his feet in turning over documents related to contracts, salaries and court spending - all of which are supposed to be public.

Another politician might live outside his district

The Los Angeles District Attorney's Office has alleged that L.A. City Councilman Richard Alarcon and state Sen. Roderick Wright live outside their respective districts, and lied about it, and now the Union-Tribune reports that the DA in San Diego County is looking into an allegation that Vista City Councilman Bob Campbell lives outside the city he represents, in nearby San Marcos.

"Nixonian dragnet" in L.A. County

Open-government activist and attorney Terry Francke has penned a blistering column chastising the L.A. County Board of Supervisors for launching an investigation into leaks to the L.A. Times about the county's troubled child welfare agency.

Francke writes:

...the state’s largest county, which may be doing the state’s worst job in child welfare, is reacting to newspaper reports on the heartbreaking results of its failures by loosing the hounds to find who in its ranks furnished reporters with the facts.  In blithe dismissal of the Brown Act, the board of supervisors majority even initially used an unlawful closed session to hear, discuss and approve top bureaucrats’ request for the witch hunt.

The pretext for this Nixonian dragnet is that laws for the protection of minors’ privacy have been violated. While that may or may not be the case, the question pales beside the issue of whether those laws are anything more but a pious cover for the most secretive and potentially destructive archipelago of government power in today’s society—the joined-at-the-hip realm of the juvenile dependency court and child welfare systems.

Supervisors' slush funds probed

The L.A. District Attorney's Public Integrity Division has asked the county counsel's office to explain under what authority members of the County Board of Supervisors spent $3.4 million of public money on private projects, and will examine whether the board violated state open-meetings law by spending the money without a public vote. LAT

After the storms

Guy McCarthy at Watershed News photographed parts of the San Gabriel Valley foothills and mountains on Saturday and Sunday mornings to show what the storms had done. Ducks, snow, mud and more.

(photo courtesy of Watershed News)

What ZevPost costs

So how much does Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky spend to run the county news website his office launched last month? According to Chief Deputy Supervisor Alisa Belinkoff Katz, $113,400 a year.

She broke it all down in an email:

The website is paid for utilizing funds from Supervisor Yaroslavsky's office budget. We have two part-time Web News Writers who are paid $3,000 a month each. We currently have a contract with a web developer for $3,000 a month. We also have a contract for hosting of the website that costs $450 a month (it would have cost us $1200 a month had we used the County's servers for this purpose). Special Project's Deputy Joel Sappell edits the site in addition to his many other duties. Finally, each of our staff members contributes ideas and, occasionally, copy and photos for the site.

ZevPost launches

You don't need two hands to count the number of reporters who cover the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors - which governs most populous county in the nation - on a daily basis. And, since L.A. County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky now has a staff of former journalists working for him that rivals some local newspapers, he's unveiled his own site to chronicle county doings.

From his inaugural blog entry:

Let me be clear, we’re not purporting to be a journalistic organization or to end-run traditional news outlets with propagandistic content. We are simply offering you another stop on your daily journey through the web for deeper coverage in areas we’ve long considered priorities: health, transportation, the environment, arts and culture, public safety, social services and the economy.

As long as readers (who I'm sure will mostly be media types and other government officials) take the above statement to heart and approach the site with a healthy dose of skepticism, ZevPost should be a net positive to county coverage. And if it further reduces press-release journalism in our staff starved newsrooms, all the better.

There are pitfalls, of course. How does the site operate during campaign season (and how is it paid for)? Does Zev restrict access to journalists in favor of his own friendly writeup - or point reporters to his site rather than agree to answer tough questions? Do news sites disseminate his reports, spin included, and call it news?

The big worry is that this type of site lets a politician leap frog the media filter. But I think this just makes the filter more vital. And given the fact that some of the other supervisors live inside protective bubbles, let's hope this experiment increases the level of scrutiny given to all five members of the board.

(found via LA Observed)

L.A. County traffic plan

Reporters used to be able to wander the back rooms and corridors at the County Board of Supervisors meeting room, but no more. The reporters - fewer than you can count on one hand - were creating a traffic jam, the supervisors said. Now only lobbyists and union bosses will be allowed to walk the hallowed hallways. Coincidentally, at least two of the supervisors have veteran reporters on staff to work up their own versions of the news. LAT

(via LA Observed)

The watchdogs that didn't bark

James Rainey of the Los Angeles Times peeks his head into L.A. County's Hall of Administration and notices that the supervisors now outnumber the reporters who are there to cover them:

A slow plague has reduced the corps of journalists who cover county government to four. That's just four reporters (and one of them has other responsibilities) who focus a critical eye on the biggest local government in America -- a $22-billion behemoth that provides policing, healthcare, welfare and more to a county of nearly 10 million people.

-snip-

Some news outlets have gone out of business. Others discontinued regular county coverage. Small nameplates on one wall display the names of the dead and or merely departed: the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, the Outlook, the Daily Journal, the Newhall Signal, the Whittier News, KFWB radio, KABC-TV, the Long Beach Press-Telegram and the Pasadena Star News.

The daily newspapers in Long Beach, Torrance and Pasadena all used to station reporters here. But that changed when Singleton snapped up the organizations over the last decade. His eight L.A.-area dailies serve vastly different communities, but they now rely on just one reporter, Troy Anderson, for all stories on county government.

County coverage has been diminishing for years, and the slippage only promises to accelerate as newspapers continue to cut and consolidate. It should be noted that these same eight MediaNews newspapers already are without a single reporter in Washington, DC or Sacramento, and most have too few reporters to keep a watchful eye on all of the cities in their respective circulation areas.