Hiring

Despite deepening worries about the region's economy and a growing municipal budget deficit, Los Angeles city leaders Tuesday refused to back away from a Police Department buildup even if it means sacrificing other basic services. The City Council decided against reducing the size of next month's Los Angeles Police Department Academy class, an action that would have saved nearly $700,000 this budget year and more than $3 million in the year that begins July 1.

The idea of hiring John Lucas had been percolating in Mike Dunleavy's mind for quite a while, and finally it came time to put it out there. "It was one of those ideas," said Dunleavy, the Clippers' general manager and coach. "Hey, unless I ask him, I won't know." Dunleavy said Thursday morning that Lucas, a well-respected former NBA player and coach, was at the team's offices in Playa Vista and would be joining the Clippers coaching staff. Lucas has a long-standing relationship with Dunleavy, and many of the current Clippers have worked out with Lucas at his Houston base.

In an abrupt reversal of an earlier decision that drew the ire of rape victim advocates, city officials have cleared the way for the Los Angeles Police Department's crime lab to hire more staff capable of DNA analysis. The about-face amounts to a belated attempt by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and City Council members to salvage a city plan to eliminate a backlog of untested DNA evidence from rape cases and to prevent a new one from piling up. Despite the renewed commitment to hire more DNA analysts, the bureaucratic wrangling has pushed back the city's initial timetable for eliminating the backlog.

Faced with an unrelenting fiscal crisis, Los Angeles city officials have refused to hire needed analysts for the Los Angeles Police Department's crime laboratory, hampering a plan to eliminate a backlog of untested DNA evidence from rape cases and angering victims' rights advocates. Last spring, despite a near freeze on all city hiring, the City Council set aside $1.4 million to hire 26 staffers for the LAPD lab and cover their salaries for about six months. The proposed hires were part of a three-year plan that Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and other officials unveiled in 2008, vowing at the time that it would remedy the chronic staffing shortfalls in the lab that had led to a massive backup of evidence.

For graduating college seniors, the job market is, well, awesome, dude: Hiring is up sharply and corporate competition for the class of 2006 is hot. But for employers, the real challenge isn't getting the freshly minted grads to sign on. It's getting them to stay. Employers and hiring experts say the younger generation no longer approaches the first job as a nest for the next 10 or five or even three years.

When Michigan-based automotive supplier Lear Corp. needed a secretary for its office in the central Mexican state of Guanajuato, it placed a classified ad seeking a "female ... aged 20 to 28 ... preferably single ... with excellent presentation." And to ensure that it got the right candidate, Lear asked applicants to include a recent photo with their resumes. In the United States, that ad might draw howls of protest and trigger lawsuits and hefty fines.

UC Irvine gave Orange County billionaire Donald Bren the right to be consulted in the selection of a dean for its new law school in return for his $20-million donation, according to documents released to The Times on Thursday. The eight-page gift agreement reveals the scope of what Bren received for his money, ranging from major matters such as selection of the dean to specific rules governing how prominently signs featuring his name were to be displayed on the campus.

2010 will not be the year the hiring floodgates open. Although certain sectors of the economy are showing signs of a thaw, employers say they plan to tread carefully in the coming year, and those that are hiring say they will wait until the second half to fill jobs. But there is hope for employees who saw hours and benefits slashed, or who took on extra responsibilities as companies tried to hold on to the talent that kept them afloat in tough times. Tom Wilson, managing director at investment management firm Brinker Capital, said unemployment was expected to decline by 1 percentage point each year as the economy recovers, meaning that by the end of 2010, unemployment would hover at about 9%. Over the last 18 months, people have "hunkered down" at their jobs, said Brian Kropp, managing director of the Corporate Leadership Council, which surveys about 300,000 employees each quarter.

For the first time in several years, both the LAPD and Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department have ample war chests to hire more officers -- but Sheriff Lee Baca is leaving Chief William J. Bratton in the dust. An aggressive recruitment effort has helped the Sheriff's Department hire 1,000 deputies this year, while the Los Angeles Police Department is lagging behind, having brought in about half that number of officers in 2006.

A breakdown in county procedures meant to protect patients and ensure standards for health professionals allowed a temporary employment agency to send a convicted rapist to work at a large East Los Angeles clinic, according to the head of Los Angeles County's health department.