Time off for L.A. officials is tricky business
Some taxpayers wonder if they're paying for days when city leaders are stumping for presidential candidates in Iowa or attending motorcycle rallies in South Dakota.
Several readers wrote to complain that there wasn't quite enough "A" in last week's Q&A.
Their beef: They wanted to know who was paying for Los Angeles City Council President Eric Garcetti and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to travel outside California and stump for presidential candidates. Garcetti is backing Sen. Barack Obama while Villaraigosa is pushing Sen. Hillary Clinton.
With that in mind, we'll turn over our first question to Richard Pridham of Downey, who asks . . .
Did you look into whether they were off the job on their time, or was their out-of-state work done at taxpayers' expense?
Garcetti's office said he paid for his trip to Iowa out of his own pocket. As for the mayor, his spokesman said the Clinton campaign paid the expenses of Villaraigosa and the press aide he took with him to Iowa and New Hampshire.
The time issue is trickier. Elected officials in Los Angeles -- and many other governments -- do not accrue vacation or sick time. The theory is that elected officials are always on the clock and that it's up to them to take vacation at their discretion, according to the city clerk's office. In Garcetti's case, the council was in recess when he went to Iowa.
Public officials are not required to announce that they're taking time off. So, the task of determining whether days off qualify as work or vacation is pretty much left up to the public and the media, for better or worse.
For example, I wrote last year about Councilman Tom LaBonge's extensive travels abroad. But I never reported Councilman Dennis Zine taking time off in August for a motorcycle rally in South Dakota or his vacation in Italy in the fall or the autumn trip to Japan with Port of L.A. officials.
On all three occasions, the City Council was in session back home in L.A.
Villaraigosa tackled the presidential campaign issue at Thursday's downtown mass transit conference, when he said that he's worked as hard as any public official in recent years to advance the transportation priorities of Los Angeles.
"I'm not making it up," the mayor said, adding: "So why is Villaraigosa schlepping in New Hampshire and Iowa? I know that the mayor of Los Angeles has to have a relationship with someone in the White House that will actually invest in cities again [and] invest in public transportation."
What has Clinton said recently about mass transit?
