Time for Spring Cleaning

Mayor Tom Bradley and the Los Angeles City Council have given their controversial housing chief, Homer Smith, new bosses and fewer aides in an attempt to clean up departmental mismanagement. They’ve tightened banking and bidding requirements. They’ve focused on almost everything except the obvious: the need to review the performance of Smith himself.

More than two years ago, Times staff writer Claire Spiegel reported that Smith had ignored competitive bidding practices, paid a former top aide thousands of dollars for virtually no work, and made unauthorized payments to an architect friend from his position as executive director of the Los Angeles City Housing Authority. Instead of disciplining Smith, whose contract does not expire until 1987, the mayor disbanded the commission and turned the supervisory function over to the City Council.

Now the council has drawn up its own report. As one sign of bad management, it cites heavy turnover among top aides who are exempt from civil service and thus could be summarily fired by Smith. The council sharply reduced these positions. It also tightened management procedures that had resulted in the agency falling eight years behind in modernizing city-run housing units and losing 400 proposed new housing units that the federal government was going to finance.

The council has yet to act on two important recommendations in its management review. One would give any commission overseeing the housing authority an independent analyst to help with its work. The other would require a performance review of Smith’s work.

Both recommendations should be approved, especially in order to give the city clear guidance when Smith’s contract comes up for renewal in two years.

Ultimately, the City Council needs to shed its day-to-day supervisory role that results in it deciding, for example, how many frost-free refrigerators the housing authority buys. The current seven-member citizens’ advisory panel appears knowledgeable enough to be given real authority. But not until all the reforms are in place.