Opinion: An impatient Chick

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So whose fault is this whole mess between Controller Laura Chick and City Atty. Rocky Delgadillo?

Yesterday the City Council pleaded with them both to at least suspend their (potentially costly, and certainly embarrassing) legal battle, and Delgadillo’s chief deputy quickly said his boss was willing.

So isn’t Chick the unreasonable one, because she told the council she wouldn’t back down and would see them all in court? At taxpayer expense, no less?

Actually, no. Sure, Chick could be a lot more collegial about the whole thing, but there’s a point at which being collegial looks an awful lot like being a sucker, and it’s hard to blame her if she believed she was about to be pushed past that point.

Chick claimed that her power to conduct performance audits of city programs included the workers’ compensation function in Delgadillo’s office, and Delgadillo thought she was wrong, for several reasons. For one thing, he said her authority doesn’t extend to programs run by other elected officials. For another, his office said, workers’ comp isn’t even a program. It’s just people. Who just do stuff. So when Chick served a subpoena on those people, Delgadillo -- whose tasks include interpreting the city charter -- went to court to block her. His action was reasonable enough.

But Delgadillo’s self-interest in making that interpretation is obvious, and it’s pretty clear that Chick had to go to either the courts, or the voters, or someone else outside city government to settle the disagreement -- or else permit the power of the controller to be (in her view) diminished. So sue me, she told Delgadillo, and he did.

That leaves the City Council.

The council started off on the right foot, with leaders offering to mediate between the city attorney and controller, and suggesting that perhaps someone else be hired to audit workers’ comp.

The council ultimately proposed going to the ballot in the March 3 city election to let voters decide what kind of power they want the controller to have. So far, so good.

But then the council acted like the council. Which means members waited until the 11th hour to discuss what the measure would say. They’d had three months to finalize wording, but they dragged their collective feet until Nov. 7, their deadline for getting something on the ballot, and then they didn’t pass anything. So that whole ballot solution? Forget it. Remarks from the council floor made it pretty clear there had been very little enthusiasm for putting the question to voters in the first place.

That same day, the council put a solar power measure on the March ballot even though there were still many unanswered questions about it. Don’t worry, members said; we’ll get the answers by election day. So it’s clear they can put something on the ballot if they want to.

If you’re Laura Chick, you must feel like you’ve been had. She had suspended her subpoenas, and the council had bought itself three months, but then stalled and finally failed to deliver. There was no suggestion on that last day that the council would try again. Tough luck, Laura. So Chick reinstated her subpoenas, and Delgadillo reinstated his suit.

A few days later, Councilman Tom LaBonge came back with a motion to try again, this time for the May 19 election. And good for LaBonge for the attempt, but it was too little and too late. It’s not even clear there’s going to be a May election; it’s a kind of place-holder for any necessary runoff if the March election doesn’t produce majority winners in each race. And also, why would Chick expect the council to get its act together for May when it couldn’t, or wouldn’t, do it for March?

Yesterday, the question before the council was whether to allocate Chick $100,000 to hire a lawyer to defend herself against Delgadillo’s suit. But the council didn’t even vote on that. It instead asked Chick and Delgadillo again to suspend their spat pending some new attempt at a council-brokered resolution.

But just as with the March 3 ballot deadline, the clock is ticking, and it’s ticking against Chick. Of the 30 days she has to respond to Delgadillo’s court complaint, she’s got only 10 or so left. And in her own tenure as controller, she has just over six months left. The council filibustered for three months already, so it’s entirely plausible that it would delay until the question is moot.

Insert your Lucy-pulling-away-football cliché here. And get ready to watch, and pay for, the case of the city of Los Angeles vs. City Controller Laura Chick.

* Laura Chick photo: Rick Meyer / Los Angeles Times

* Rocky Delgadillo photo: Carlos Chavez / Los Angeles Times