A rundown budget motel in Culver City is being transformed into an oasis for homeless families, a place where they can find emergency housing and comprehensive services designed to stabilize and restore their lives. Set to open in late January, 2010, the Family Shelter, operated by the Santa Monica-based Upward Bound House, will become the first emergency family shelter on the Westside in at least a decade.

“We are filling a real need,” says Upward Bound House Executive Director David Snow.

The $4 million transformation of the former Sunbay Motel on Washington Boulevard will allow it to house as many as 72 homeless adults and kids – an estimated 210 children and their parents each year. Families may come from anywhere in Los Angeles County and remain for up to three months, until they’ve secured permanent housing or moved into a transitional apartment while awaiting a permanent residence.

Keeping families together during the 90-day transition is the shelter’s goal. “Our entire model is keeping families intact, so each family will have its own unit” housing up to four people, Snow says. He anticipates that most clients will be single-parent families with one, two or three children. The new facility also will feature an on-site playground and a computer lab for kids.

Beyond safe living spaces, the Upward Bound House Family Shelter will provide comprehensive homeless services, including what Snow calls “wraparound case management” intended to teach adult skills, such as household budgeting, that will help residents succeed on their own.

Families will get two daily meals in a new multi-purpose room, thanks to pledged donations of leftover food from Second Helpings and Google. Youngsters will be enrolled in Culver City or LAUSD schools to ensure continuity.

The Sunbay cost $3 million to acquire, with another $1 million for renovations that will give the facility a contemporary, energy-efficient look, says Jay Vanos, principal at Jay Vanos Architects, which designed the new facility. Vanos’s team is using sustainable materials, is saving cooling costs by blocking excessive sunlight with “eyebrows” over windows and is replacing the old pink and white color scheme with “a warm grey to maintain a quiet low profile” in the neighborhood.

Funding flowed from a variety of sources, a reflection that several cities will benefit from the new facility. Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky provided $750,000 in Third District funds as seed money. That amount was matched by then-Supervisor Yvonne B. Burke of the Second District, which includes Culver City. The cities of Los Angeles, Santa Monica and Beverly Hills also made contributions.

None of the young women who graduated this fall from the sheriff’s academy have met the grandmother who fought their battles, who paved the way for them to comprise 40 percent of their class for the first time in department history.

If they’ve heard of Susan Bouman at all, it’s only as the name on an aging court case.

Back in 1980, Deputy Bouman filed a federal class-action lawsuit alleging gender discrimination after she was denied a promotion to sergeant. She won the case in 1988 and received $31,500 in back pay, plus benefits.

More important, the case led to a federally-mandated agreement—a consent decree—compelling the department to hire and promote more women and establish a state of the art anti-harassment policy. That victory was much longer in the making.

This fall, nearly two decades after Bouman’s retirement, a federal district court judge quietly lifted a major portion of the consent decree, verifying that the department has successfully put policies in place to effectively guard against sexual harassment. The so-called “equity” portion of the consent decree was the second major victory, following the creation of a gender-neutral sergeant’s exam that won court approval in 2007.

The anti-harassment victory was bittersweet for the 61-year-old former sheriff’s deputy, now known as Susan Paolino. She recalls the years of appeals and foot-dragging that preceded the strides of more recent times. “I think that they’ve made a lot of progress,” says Paolino, who retired as a sergeant in 1990 with a stress disability she attributes to years of fighting the department. “But I’m sorry it’s taken so long.”

Undersheriff Larry Waldie, who oversees compliance with the so-called Bouman decree, points proudly to the department’s harassment policy “as a model for other departments.” But he acknowledges that, for years, the department “chose to take everything to court” rather than resolve the harassment and promotion problems.

“Quite frankly,” he says, “our old way was not the right way.”

A consent decree is a voluntary but binding pact supervised by a judge, with the defendant and plaintiff agreeing to a series of remedies to correct the contested behavior. In some cases—such as the federal consent decree recently lifted at the LAPD–courts appoint third-party monitors. In this case, the judge ordered the two sides to work matters out between themselves, with the judge as the final arbiter. In all consent decrees, judges can impose sanctions, including fines.

“Everybody asks what’s taken so long,” says Paolino’s attorney, Dennis Harley. The answer, he says, is simple: In the early years of the case, sheriffs Peter Pitchess and Sherman Block “didn’t want anyone telling them what to do.”

Today, women make up nearly 17 percent of the sheriff’s sworn personnel, slightly less than the percentage of women in the LAPD. Paolino credits Sheriff Lee Baca, who assumed office in 1998, for more rapidly upending the old-boy culture.

“When he came in,” Paolino says, “the department began an effort to comply with the consent decree. Before that, they fought it tooth and nail.”

Observers and attorneys familiar with the case agree. “It was a priority for Sheriff Baca to resolve the issues under the consent decree to move the department forward,” says Abby Liebman, founder of the California Women’s Law Center and a former member of the Equity Oversight Panel, created by County Supervisors in 2002 to monitor harassment incidents and recommend discipline within the department.

In the mid-1970s, Paolino, then known as Bouman, was a young deputy who couldn’t win promotion to sergeant, despite scoring well on the exam. Harassment and discrimination were pervasive, she says, a part of the culture. Male colleagues left pornographic pictures lying around and flooded her mailbox with transfer request forms so she’d get the hint and leave.

After her internal appeals failed, she filed her lawsuit. By the time she won, she’d been promoted to sergeant, but male colleagues still behaved badly. “There was more harassment after I was sergeant than before,” she says.
The department, meanwhile, fought the judgment at the Ninth Circuit and the U.S. Supreme Court without success, before entering into the consent decree in 1993.

By then, Paolino had retired and started law school. She practiced gender-discrimination law in Whittier and, among her cases, successfully sued Los Angeles County on behalf of female lifeguards who’d been harassed by their male colleagues. Retiring from the law earlier this decade, she moved to San Diego County to help raise a grandchild.

Paolino says she doesn’t hear from women at the Sheriff’s Department but regards herself as a pioneer, saying her suit has “made a big difference” in the department’s gender policies and practices.

Still, two hurdles remain before the consent decree can be vacated entirely.

One concerns ending gender bias in the hiring of entry-level deputies. To increase numbers, the department is aiming at a goal of averaging 20.11 percent women for each graduating class. The department has reached that number in every class since July 2008, with two most recent graduations this fall hitting the 40 percent mark. The department also is revising the physical fitness and firearms tests to level the playing field for women.

“They seem to be working hard to get females through the academy now,” Paolino says.

The other remaining hurdle involves the hiring of women into 51 “coveted positions,” key deputy positions that can serve as stepping stones for eventual promotion to sergeant. To be certain that the job requirements don’t favor men, the department has hired outside experts to “validate” new tests for each position. Only one of the jobs has been validated so far, with a second following in a few weeks. Attorneys on both sides expect the pace to accelerate markedly next year.

In the meantime, the department’s interim goal is to have the percentage of women in those coveted positions be proportional to their overall representation in the department—currently, a lag of about two percentage points that sheriff’s officials hope to fix next year, says Capt. Larry Brogan of the Sheriff’s Labor Relations and Compliance section.

If the department remains on track, the decree could be lifted by mid 2012. For her part, Paolino is optimistic but retains the wary perspective of a battle-scarred veteran.

“I’ve got a 30 year history with this,” she says. “I was seen inside the department as a three-headed monster.”

The new Expo Line, originally envisioned to be up and running from downtown Los Angeles to Culver City by next summer, is now expected to open sometime in 2011. But efforts are underway to determine whether a “partial opening” of the light rail line—perhaps as far as the Crenshaw station—can take place before the end of next year.

The shifting timetable means that the Culver City station is not expected to open until 2012.

Meanwhile, work is progressing on the final environmental impact report for Phase 2 of the project, which would extend the line from Culver City to Santa Monica.

Responding to direction from Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, the Expo staff is now working with community groups to resolve concerns about traffic, grade crossing safety, proposed parking restrictions on Westwood Boulevard and Overland Avenue, and the line’s proposed Santa Monica maintenance facility.

“We are working with the communities to address their concerns,” says Expo spokeswoman Gabriela G. Collins.

The Exposition Construction Authority’s board will be asked to approve the final environmental impact report for Phase 2 at its January meeting.

When completed, Phase 1 of the Expo Line will be roughly 8.6 miles in length and parallel the heavily congested Santa Monica Freeway. The estimated travel time from downtown Los Angeles to Culver City will be less than 30 minutes, with a projected ridership of 27,000 by 2020. By the time Phase 2 is complete, it would possible to travel the entire length of the line—from the 7th Street station downtown to Santa Monica—in 44 to 50 minutes. The total ridership is expected to reach up to 64,000 a day by 2030.

Expo officials describe the line as a “Transit Parkway” that will include bike and pedestrian paths, as well as trees and landscaping along the alignment.

Transportation projects tend to move slowly, but those seeking a jolt of instant gratification can take a video ride on the Expo line, courtesy of this clip created by the Urban Simulation Team at UCLA.

Other information about the project is available at here.

Updated 12/16:

With the final environmental impact report on Phase 2 of the Expo Line expected to be released later this week, the Exposition Metro Line Construction Authority has agreed to postpone till Feb. 4 the Expo board’s vote on the plan.

The delay, requested by Los Angeles City Councilmembers Paul Koretz and Bill Rosendahl and supported by Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, will allow more time for interested residents and community and elected leaders to review the plan before it comes before the Expo board.

Once the final environmental impact report is certified by the board, a contractor can be selected and the construction phase will begin.

Updated 12/21:

The final environmental impact report for Expo Phase 2 has been released. Read it here. The Exposition Construction Authority’s Board of Directors will consider it on Thursday, February 4. The meeting will start at 2 p.m. and will be held in the Board of Supervisors’ hearing room on the third floor of the Kenneth Hahn Hall of Administration, 500 W. Temple Street, Los Angeles, 90012.

They set out to solve one mystery, but they ended up with another.

First, the good news: An unusual three-year research partnership has found that the water quality at Malibu’s Escondido and Paradise Cove beaches is dramatically better than expected. Now the puzzling news: Nobody knows why.

“It’s like you hired Scotland Yard to solve a murder and three weeks later the dead person walks in and says, ‘Whatcha doing?’ ” says Steve Weisberg, executive director of the Southern California Coastal Water Research Project, which is running the study with $800,000 in funding from Los Angeles County. “We were hired to find the source of the problem….Where we’re at is a point of frustration.”

When the project started in May, 2006, the targeted beaches stood out as significant problem areas, according to Mark Gold, president of Heal the Bay, which has participated in the research along with the county Department of Public Works.

“Escondido was the most polluted beach we had ever seen,” Gold says. On the group’s annual Beach Report Card, he says, “I think it got a zero one year.” (Now Escondido Creek, just east of Escondido State Beach, and Paradise Cove Pier at Ramirez Canyon Creek mouth are both on the group’s honor roll.)

Back then, Gold suspected that the pollution was coming from “illegal dumping of tremendous amounts of horse manure” and maybe also from waste discharge problems from a nearby restaurant and some mobile homes.

All this added up to an opportunity for some collaborative detective work, bringing together the county and its sometime-adversary Heal the Bay, which has pushed hard for more aggressive government enforcement of clean water regulations.

The Southern California Water Research Project was “brought in as a neutral party,” Weisberg says, adding that he thought the best way to achieve a détente was to have everyone in the field “taking samples together.”

At their disposal was an array of scientific tools – including tests for optical brighteners found in laundry detergent to learn if household wastewater was involved. (For more on those, click here.) Overall, the prospects for finally determining whodunit (or whatdunit) looked good.

“The problem,” Weisberg says, “is that we just have not found strong, recurrent problems at that beach.”

One theory holds that a series of unusually dry winters led to a temporary improvement in the bacteria levels flowing from Escondido and Ramirez creeks into the bay. Another scenario posits that someone was illegally dumping, found out about the study in progress and decided to clean up his or her act. Or maybe different testing methods yield a different result? “We don’t know,” Weisberg says, “but we know it stopped.”

Weisberg says the hunt will continue in the coming year, with some discussion of testing to determine whether “birds pooping on the beach” mighty be to blame for the pollution, rather than problems in the watershed.

Gold, for his part, thinks it’s probably not worth continuing the testing effort unless there’s significantly more rainfall this year, which would bring more runoff to analyze. He does, however, advocate keeping an eye on a restaurant at the “very lowest part of the watershed.”

“You never get to pack your bags and go home,” says Gold, who praises Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky for responding to long-running concerns about the beaches’ bacteria levels and pushing for funds to study the problem. “I’m glad we did it,” Gold says. “I think it put a lot of people’s minds at ease.”

Mark Pestrella, deputy director of water resources for the county Department of Public Works, says he also is glad the study went forward and wants to see it continue for a fourth year. “The supervisors and the constituents out there really want to know that these beaches are safe,” Pestrella says.

“The study helped us set up protocols that were not in place before….Methods of sampling, the health department’s and Heal the Bay’s, were tried side by side,” he says. “It gave us more information on the percentage of the problem we should allocate to humans. Although we didn’t actually break down every source, we eliminated several areas. In Escondido, we were able to say we did not find a human source of indicator bacteria at the beach.”

The bottom line, Pestrella says, is that the study so far has “bettered the county’s understanding of how to monitor and test for indicator bacteria. It very much put science in front of rhetoric.”

Against the vast backdrop of the federal stimulus program, $420,084 may not seem like such a massive sum.

But to Tiffany Gallindo, it’s huge. It means she can keep her job on the front lines of the Ryman Arts program, working to bring a free visual arts education and college guidance to gifted Los Angeles high school students, many of them low-income.

It means that Samuel Jang gets to continue his work as production manager for the Southwest Chamber Music Society, including helping to put together ambitious upcoming tours to Mexico and Vietnam.

And it means that Kenton J. Haleem of the Hollywood Entertainment Museum can bring back a position recently put on “hiatus”—a program manager in the organization’s media arts training program for at-risk kids.

All three organizations recently were singled out for grants of American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) funds from the National Endowment for the Arts. The cash infusion comes thanks to the efforts of the Los Angeles County Arts Commission and the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, which together were able to preserve 21 positions in 16 arts organizations.

“The arts are a huge economic engine for our whole region,” says Laura Zucker, executive director of the County Arts Commission. “This is an important employer,” Zucker says, noting that the 300-plus arts organizations that are funded by the county employ more than 21,000 people.

And the importance of the organizations can be measured in more than just paychecks.

At Ryman Arts, a small nonprofit using donated studio space on the USC campus, they’re feeling the economic pains of students and recent alumni first-hand.

“Their calls and needs have been more urgent: Can we point them to more scholarship opportunities because they can’t take on more college loans? Can we arrange for them to stay after class to draw, because the electricity has been turned off at their apartment?” the organization said in its application for the grant. “Can we write another recommendation letter for a college application because they don’t have an art teacher at school?”

On the front lines is Gallindo, handling the phones, shepherding student applications, working to bring the aspiring artists and their work into the fold.

“I actually went to an arts high school,” says Gallindo, a dancer who attended Los Angeles County High School for the Arts and had been working at an insurance company before joining Ryman. “It changed my life and it opened doors. To be a part of something that is providing that opportunity to kids today is very rewarding.” (View recent student artwork on Ryman’s Flickr site).

The grant “just gives us a huge sigh of relief,” says Ryman’s executive director, Diane Brigham. “With the downturn, I had to lay off another position entirely… We’re [now] a four-person organization. And I’m really glad we’re not a three-person organization.”

At the Southwest Chamber Music Society, there’s a similar mixture of excitement about upcoming projects—and concern about how to carry out an increasingly ambitious mission in an economic downturn.

On the plus side, the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department is sponsoring Southwest as it travels later this year to represent the U.S. at the Guadalajara FIL Arts Festival. Even more complex is next year’s State Department-sponsored Ascending Dragon Music Festival and Cultural Exchange, which will include music festivals, educational programs and administrative workshops in the U.S. and Vietnam.

“This is what we’re calling a transformative year for Southwest Chamber Music,” says Executive Director Jan Karlin, “and we needed to bring in someone to manage it.”

But because Southwest is “seeing a substantial decrease in most of our funding sources,” the federal stimulus funds were needed to pay Jang’s salary, the organization said in its application. He will not only to help manage the upcoming tours but also holds considerable responsibilities for Southwest’s musical and educational outreach throughout Los Angeles County.

Jang, whose background is in financial systems analysis and who served on Southwest’s board as treasurer before joining its staff, says he is relishing the change in perspective that comes with his new position.

“Having come from the financial services world—one of the casualties of this recession—it’s a really eye-opening opportunity for me,” he says. Working with “staff, musicians and audiences puts a more human face on this organization. Just last week, I coordinated the start of our music educational program at Keppel and Pasadena high schools.”

Across town, the Hollywood Entertainment Museum has been trying to help a new generation write its own kind of history, as 75 high school students—many of them dropouts, on probation, or otherwise “at risk”—learn the ropes of entertainment industry trades. The museum’s educational arm, the Hollywood Media Arts Academy, which is a collaboration with L.A. County Office of Education and the Probation Department, combines core academics with elective classes, including animation, dance, film production and acting.

The federal grant “can’t come soon enough,” says Haleem, the organization’s director of education and development, who says the group’s program manager had been placed on “somewhat of a hiatus.” Now that there’s money to rehire, he says, “I’m hoping she’s still available.”

“Things are tough right now,” he says. “I think that is the story of the nonprofits right now.”

In all, the NEA gave out 630 direct grants totaling $29.7 million, with $4.45 million going to California, including funds provided to the city and county commissions.

To view a full list of the county and city grants, click here.

You might think of them more as tree-savers than tree-huggers. But members of the Los Angeles County Fire Department are getting high marks for the eco-friendly landscaping at Station 65 in Agoura. And that’s just the beginning.

This station, along with another nearby, is about to get even more environmentally friendly with a makeover that will place it at the forefront of the county’s new pollution-fighting, water-conserving policies for new development.

The changes so far are subtle but important.

Grass has been replaced with artificial turf, organic mulch and rock ground cover in the new design, sketched out by Ronald M. Durbin, a deputy forester in the fire department’s Malibu Forestry Unit. There are roses around a memorial monument in front of the station, but the rest of the new planting emphasizes native plants, such as oak, sycamore and walnut trees as well as drought-tolerant ornamentals. The irrigation system is super-thrifty—with water directed at individual plants instead of spraying wide areas.

The new look caught the eye of the Las Virgenes Municipal Water District, which in June awarded the station its citizen of the month award. “Somebody did a good thing,” says Jeff Reinhardt, the district’s public affairs and communications manager. “You don’t have to have the lush green stuff, you know.”

The landscaping makeover is a small part of a bigger environmental push. Next up for station 65 and nearby station 67 are low-impact development retrofits—the first such makeovers to test-drive new water-saving, pollution-fighting requirements mandated for new development in the county. (Learn more about LID here.)

The goal of the program, essentially, is to keep rainwater from running off the property to replenish ground water supplies and, when possible, be reused for onsite irrigation. That means creating a new “bioswale planting area” and adding permeable paving, a planting area for gray water use, a cistern and even a rain barrel.

The LID improvements, to be funded with $872,000 in county funds appropriated under the leadership of Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, are expected to be approved by the Board of Supervisors on November 17 and should be in place by next year.

The Fire Department understands the need to be a positive environmental role model, says Durbin, who also has degrees in landscape architecture from Cal Poly Pomona.

“We’re in the public eye every day, so we need to set an example,” Durbin says.

That’s why the water district was eager to seize on the fire station as a public statement of water-thriftiness, done in an attractive way.

“It’s adjacent to the Paramount Ranch area but it’s also adjacent to some estate properties, and the folks who drive by there every day are going to see that,” Reinhardt says. “The statement it makes has got a lot of impact. It’s not only saving water but it blends more with the area. You’ve got this very water-wise projection into the community.”

Of course, as drought penalties for overuse kick in, the district also can get profligate users’ attention the old fashioned way. “About three weeks ago, we sent out a bill for $12,100 for a two-month billing cycle,” says Reinhardt of the Las Virgenes Municipal Water District. “The old model is just not sustainable.”

In theory, it was a win-win.

Nine years ago, California voters overwhelmingly approved a measure to put low-level drug offenders on a path to rehabilitation while potentially saving taxpayers huge sums in jail costs.

Proposition 36 guaranteed non-violent drug and alcohol abusers the right to enter community-based treatment programs in lieu of incarceration. Since its passage, a yearly average of more than 50,000 individuals statewide has opted for the program, more than 25% of them in L.A. County.

Today, however, the alternative-sentencing program is imperiled, a victim of California’s budget mess. State legislators, faced with a gaping deficit this summer, eliminated the measure’s $120 million budget, forcing California’s hard-pressed counties to confront the consequences.

Although the state has appropriated $18 million in other treatment monies and has held out the possibility of giving counties millions more in federal stimulus funds next year, the impact on L.A. County has been swift and severe. In late September, the Board of Supervisors was forced to sign off on a stunning 80 percent reduction in Prop. 36 treatment services.

“The law will still be on the books. People will still be looking for treatment. But the treatment won’t be there for many of them,” says Nicholas Vrataric, executive director of the Clare Foundation, a Westside treatment center.

Some of the fallout so far:

• Nineteen Prop. 36 drug courts have been shut down because of the slashed state funding. The Probation Department, for its part, is no longer assigning officers to misdemeanor offenders, who represent about 30 percent of total participants in Prop. 36 programs, or to centers where violators are assessed for the kind of treatment they need.
• The waiting list for Prop. 36 treatment is swelling and expected to hit around 5,000 by year’s end, says John Viernes Jr., director of the county Public Health Department’s Alcohol and Drug Program Administration. Until recently, it was zero.
• Weekly drug tests for Prop. 36 defendants have been cut to once every two weeks.
• County health officials have begun urging providers to offer treatment alternatives that cost far less than the residential and out-patient plans currently being used. Many treatment centers, however, say they’re not yet skilled in providing these alternatives and question their effectiveness.

From its earliest years, studies have shown that Prop. 36 has saved substantial sums in prison costs, with about a third of participants completing treatment—roughly the same rate as for people outside the criminal justice system who’ve sought treatment, according to UCLA researcher Darren Urada, principal investigator for an annual statewide study of Prop. 36. In L.A County, the completion rate is even higher, about 46 percent.

Still, many government players in the criminal justice system have dismissed the program as little more than a get-out-of-jail-free card, an ideal that has fallen far short of its promise to reduce substance abuse and recidivism.

Superior Court Judge Peter Espinoza, supervising judge of the criminal branch in Los Angeles, says that “at any given time, 57 percent of the felons eligible for Proposition 36 have a bench warrant outstanding,” indicating they aren’t reporting their progress to the court as required. “We consider it one of our least successful endeavors,” he says.

Scott Stickney, a Probation Department official, says that up to 70 percent of traditional, non-Prop. 36 defendants successfully complete treatment and probation, a much higher rate than for Prop. 36 participants. Stickney argues that the measure lacks the kinds of consequences, such as jail time, that many drug offenders need as motivation to complete treatment and probation.

The truth is that no matter what the funding levels or criticisms, Prop. 36 remains the law of the land, guaranteeing certain drug offenders a right to opt for substance abuse treatment rather than jail. And that has left the county’s public health and probation officials scrambling to stretch very scarce dollars.

Viernes, of the county’s alcohol and drug program, says one goal is to find ways to lower treatment costs, without sacrificing effectiveness, so that large numbers of Prop. 36 clients can still be accommodated. That may mean shortening residential treatments from 90 days to 60 days for some clients, he says, or sending them to cheaper outpatient programs or sober living homes, which would cost far less.

But the Clare Foundation’s Vrataric is one of many providers who worry that if treatment programs are cut too much, they might become ineffective. “I think the provider community has to push back,” he says. “In good conscience, that’s not good public policy.”

The county also is determined to try to line up other sources of funding for providers serving the Prop. 36 population.
And that’s welcomed news for providers such as Kathy Watt, director of the Van Ness Recovery House in Hollywood, which specializes in gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender addicts. The 20-bed facility has seen its county grant money already cut from $51,000 to $9,736.

“By the end of the month, we’ll be done with the funding” she said in a mid-October interview.

To compensate for the funding drop, Watt says she and other staffers took a 20 percent pay cut and vows not to turn away clients seeking the center’s specialized treatment. “We’ll find funding somehow,” she says.

Federal stimulus money is on the way to Los Angeles County for a program that will make it easier for homeowners and businesses to finance the installation of solar panels on their roofs.

The $15.4 million Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant, awarded at the end of September, will pay the set-up costs for a loan program to make solar panels, weatherizing and other clean-energy retrofits affordable to residents and businesses in unincorporated county areas. (Talks are underway for cities to opt in to the county’s plan soon, too.) Without the stimulus money, the county lacked the funds to set up the program, says Howard Choy, director of energy program at the county’s Information Services Department.

Once the program is up and running, the county will make low interest loans, funded by municipal bonds, to property owners, who will pay back the county over time through their property tax bills. That easy-payment mechanism will eliminate the upfront costs that are a major impediment for property owners who want to go green but lack the upfront funds for costly clean-energy retrofits.

Didn’t know about the federal stimulus grant? You can find news about all of the county’s federal stimulus grant applications at its Stimulus Funding website. Scroll down to the Status of County ARRA Grant Applications (or click here) and you’ll find a scorecard of every grant application the county has made under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, President Obama’s $787 billion federal stimulus plan better known as ARRA.

The county’s scorecard lists all of the 39 grants totaling $368 million that the county has won, including for programs to boost spending on food stamps and homelessness. The site also lists grant applications that are filed but still pending, along with those that were denied, such as one to retrofit 128 aging diesel county Public Works work vehicles with pollution-cutting devices.

Much of the money comes in “primary” grants made directly to the county or one of its agencies. Also listed are “secondary” grants made to the state of California and passed on to L.A. County in the form of road-repairing funds through Caltrans.

County officials have promised to make the reporting process transparent to the public as well as the federal government. The county beat the feds’ initial October 10 deadline to file reports on the county’s spending of grant money, a detailed accounting of funding and expenditures. (Some states and localities didn’t get in under the wire; the federal managers had to extend the reporting period for 10 days.)

Come next reporting period—in early 2010—the county’s chief executive office will list the federal grants L.A. County has received, using enhanced charts and graphics, according to Scott Wiles, special services assistant in the Operations section of the CEO’s office.

They look like government mailings. But they aren’t. And they could cost you up to $200 for a service you can get for free.

Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky is warning homeowners to avoid solicitations from firms charging a hefty fee to “assist” area homeowners in filing property assessment reduction forms. The mailings come in plain, official-looking envelopes and offer to complete an evaluation of your property’s assessed value if only you’ll send them a “processing fee check or money order.” Many unwary homeowners pay the fee only to discover that the “review” is one that the county Assessor’s Office does every day for free.

If you are think you qualify for lower property taxes, you can download forms here, and visit the County’s Assessment Appeals page for full details on all aspects of property assessment, including proposed reductions. The County Assessor has already reviewed 473,000 residential properties to consider whether their assessed values should be reduced for 2009, and property owners were notified in June of the results. Property owners can also call toll-free (888) 807-2111 for assistance. “We definitely want people to know this is a free service,” says Assessor’s Special Assistant John Noguez.

One more bit of good news: In mid October, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed AB 992, authored by Assemblyman Ted Lieu (D-Torrance), which tightens the rules against charging fees in advance for companies that actively advocate for homeowners at assessors’ offices or appeals boards.