A Fox News 11 television investigative report found that despite having a fully staffed county communications team, and grappling with potentially severe budget cuts, Los Angeles County officials have spent $1.9 million on two public relations firms to provide messaging to residents about the coronavirus, a nearly five-fold increase since April.
Initially, in April, L.A. County awarded $400,000 in no-bid contracts to Mercury Public Affairs and Fraser Communications for $200,000 each for the purpose of “COVID-19 Emergency Communications Support.”
One month prior to Mercury’s contract’s approval, a consultant for Mercury Public Affairs made a maximum political donation to County Supervisor Kathryn Barger, Fox News also reported.
According to the Mercury contract, $350,000 of county funds will be spent on “Multicultural and Ethnic Outreach and Communications,” which partially includes “recruiting and deploying non-County messengers, celebrity influencers, and other surrogates to trusted community messengers for County messaging.”
Barger previously told FOX 11 the donation she received had no bearing on the county’s approval of the contract.
“It’s public information, it’s reported, it’s legal, it bared no relevance to this contract being awarded, as a matter of fact this contract was not signed by the board,” Barger told FOX 11.
But the recently renewed Mercury contract shows that Celia Zavala, the executive officer for the Board of Supervisors, did sign off on the contract on behalf of the Board.
The Board of Supervisors has had a very public feud with L.A. County Sheriff Alex Villanueva over the county’s budget, having cut $500 million from the sheriff’s department.
“That [$1.9 million] would probably pay for at least 10 deputies working our homeless service outreach team for example, that I have no funding for and I had to tell them to pack it up, we can’t afford this anymore,” Villanueva told Fox News 11.
“When I’m picking and choosing who I’m going to lay off and they’re just throwing money at PR firms, and they’re sitting on 49 public information officers, I mean they have a platoon of people that do this, yet they hire outside, I don’t get it,” he added.
While cutting staff, the County Sheriff’s Department (LASD) also released 4,276 nonviolent inmates from county jails, or roughly 25 percent of the inmate population. The stated goal of releasing inmates was to reduce the spread of the coronavirus inside the jails. At the time of the release, 11 inmates out of 17,000 had tested positive for the virus.
The county justifies the hiring of the firms as necessary “to regularly reach every one of our 10 million residents with information about how residents can protect their own health, the health of their families, and their communities. Our consultants are helping us reach all our residents with life-saving information and every cent we spend saves lives.”
The $1.9 million worth of contracts was extended through Oct. 31 for Mercury’s firm and through June 30 for Fraser’s firm.
Critics from the California Public Policy Center argue that the county could have spent several thousand dollars using freelance workers, not several million on public relations firms.
With record number of residents unemployed and having to cut costs, Jordan Bruneau, communications director at the California Policy Center, told The Center Square, “the county government should take a page from its constituents’ playbook during the current economic turmoil and look to cut costs. It should empower its own comms team to effectively relay this information, and, if needed, spend a couple thousand, not a couple million, on outside help.”
