In an industrial zone a few blocks off the 101 Freeway, the Tarzana Treatment Center relies on government contracts and nonprofit tax status to serve drug addicts in poverty or trouble with the law.
A clerk sits behind protective glass in the lobby. Down a hallway in the detox wing, down-and-out men are curled on their cots. The coat hooks in the rooms flip down so patients can't hang themselves.
It hardly seems like the headquarters of a $45-million-a-year business.
Tarzana dwarfs most other nonprofits in the same line of work. By far the largest user of public funds for drug treatment in Los Angeles County, it draws 85% of its money from taxpayers.
Its top executives have also made it a lucrative operation for themselves, with compensation and business arrangements that are highly unusual in the industry.
Chief operating officer Albert Senella earned $428,057 in 2007, soaring above the highest paid county employee -- the medical director of Harbor UCLA Medical Center, which has a budget 12 times Tarzana's. Chief executive Scott Taylor made $330,732 working 32 hours a week.
The two men collected hundreds of thousands more in deferred compensation in recent years, boosting their earnings far above those of top executives at comparably sized treatment centers, such as Walden House in San Francisco, Gaudenzia in Norristown, Pa., and Gateway Foundation in Chicago, according to federal tax filings.
And that's not counting income from other arrangements involving legal services and real estate that several industry experts said they had never before seen at a nonprofit.
Taylor is also a lawyer with a long-standing contract to provide Tarzana with legal counsel. Tax filings show the deal paid him $237,956 in 2007 -- on top of his salary.
Taylor, Senella and two other board members also have ownership stakes in six properties that Tarzana leases as its headquarters and treatment sites.
In 2007, the four men collected rent of more than $2.27 million.
Taken together, the compensation and the other financial deals raise questions about Tarzana's public mission and about how the government allocates drug treatment dollars, experts in drug treatment and nonprofits said.
Although Tarzana gets more than double the public funding of its closest competitor, government payers can't say whether its patients fare any better than those at other centers after treatment. Nationally, no one comprehensively tracks whether patients use drugs again, find work or get arrested.
