LA Times errors, and the City can't help!

We've mentioned before how the LA Times could always do a little better job checking facts and such. And, we're not here to beat up on a paper that is going through some major growing shrinking pains.

But, two articles in the last week bear mentioning:

First, on June 1st, the Times wrote about the Mayor and his ups and downs. Pointing to his ups, there are some errors based on the failure to really fact-check. First, they write:

They [Villaraigosa and his senior aides] say, for example, that he deserves credit for balancing the city's books and dramatically reducing a $295-million structural deficit — by more than $200 million — amid declining revenues.

This statement isn't entirely true. Yes, he presented a budget that "balanced the books," but was isn't heavily reported is that the City Council and the Chief Legislative Analyst's office (CLA) went through and found more money to restore the cuts he proposed. The budget the Mayor signed looks quite different from what he initially proposed - millions of dollars different.

Then, the article goes on to say:

They [Villaraigosa and his senior aides] also speak of his successful effort to win an increase in trash collection fees to hire 1,000 additional police officers, saying the city is well on its way to meeting the goal as the rate of violent crime — including gang homicides — drops.

Here too, there is some misinformation. Actually, the City legally cannot charge a fee for one service to fund another. So, that trash collection fee increase - which is really just more of the actual cost of the service being paid for by resident - merely releases funding from the general fund that was being used to defray the cost of trash collection. So, those fees could go into any number of programs, and in fact ,this last year, not all of that trash fee money actually went into hiring more officers; there was more money available than actual officers graduating from the academy. Additionally, the actual number of cops on the street has not increased that dramatically. those 1000 additional officers so often highlighted won't be on the street for a few more years due to attrition and the slower-than-expected rate of hiring new officers.


Now, it also cracks us up that the Times took a story we wrote about last year and expanded it a bit but failed to give the full story. Just this weekend, they wrote about the origin of LA County's city names (it appears only the first part of the alphabet, A through C), which is labeled "First in a series of occasional stories." It's rather interesting, but since we did so much research on Beverly Hills, it's too bad they didn't include more of the story besides the reference to Beverly Farms.

It's too bad there's nothing the City can do to help correct this problem of lacking information in the Times, but by City Charter, the City is not allowed to operate a newspaper:

The City shall not appropriate any public money for the printing, publication, sale or distribution of a commercial municipal newspaper.