No Excuse for Wireless Excess : Taxpayers foot the bill for city, county laxity in cellular phone policy

In another embarrassing instance of government failing to mind its own store, city and county officials never implemented a formal system to evaluate who was using official cellular phones and for what purposes. As a result, Los Angeles has been stuck with scores of cellular phones it doesn’t need and big bills it shouldn’t have had to pay.

More than 20,000 pages of billing records examined in detail by The Times showed the cost to taxpayers for using cellular phones ranked far above those of other metropolitan areas, including New York. In Los Angeles, average monthly cellular bills last year approached $250,000. New York pays $108,000.

The justification for cellular phones is that they help busy local officials save time and improve efficiency away from the office. In some cases, for example department heads or top elected officials, it can be argued that cellular costs are a legitimate use of taxpayer money.

But under the current system there is no record-keeping system to carefully track calling patterns and differentiate business from personal calls. Nor has there been any attempt to determine whether some government cellular phone numbers have been “cloned” and used by thieves to make long-distance calls--a common problem for any cellular phone user.

What’s more, the county and city didn’t take advantage of discount group rates. And Los Angeles officials paid for scores of emergency phones in storage, while other jurisdictions wisely deal with phone carriers to pay only if the phones are used.

Local officials need to get a better handle on individual bills. Other cities use audits, monthly reports and computer surveillance to keep costs under control. At a minimum Los Angeles should do the same.

As for the more than 3,000 cellular phones in circulation, that’s clearly too many. It’s one thing to keep phones for emergencies. But to hand them out liberally to thousands of bureaucrats is an invitation for abuse. And it looks as if that invitation was taken up with gusto, at the expense of--who else--the taxpayers.