Monuments to Me

Los Angeles County Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich represents the Fifth District, a huge geographical area larger than the county's four other voting districts combined. The Fifth stretches from northern desert communities surrounding the Michael D. Antonovich Antelope Valley Courthouse down to the 2,326-acre Michael D. Antonovich Regional Park at Joughin Ranch and the 500-acre Michael D. Antonovich Open Space Preserve in the Santa Clarita Woodlands.

After 30 years in office, Antonovich is the Southern California king of Monuments to Me — public buildings, parks and other institutions paid for by taxpayers but named after politicians still living and/or in office.

Taxpayer groups call it the "edifice complex." The five-member Board of Supervisors has the biggest edifice complex of any elected group in Los Angeles.

In addition to Antonovich's trifecta, there's the Gloria Molina–Para Los Niños Child Development Center, the Mark Ridley-Thomas Constituent Service Center, the Don Knabe Pediatric Program at the Los Amigos Rehabilitation Center and the Zev Yaroslavsky Las Virgines Highlands Park.

The 15-member City Council has at least two projects named after current councilmen: the Councilman Greig Smith LAPD Devonshire Youth Center in Northridge and the Garcetti-LaBonge Parent Education and Childcare Center at the Santa Monica Boulevard Charter School, named after Hollywood-area council president Eric Garcetti and Hollywood-area City Councilman Tom LaBonge.

In this angry new age of voter revolts, premature honoring of elected officials for merely doing their jobs — such as steering money to the institutions honoring them — is drawing more criticism than ever.

"They really should wait at least until they've retired permanently, and preferably until they're dead and buried. Just let other people decide those kinds of legacy issues after they're gone," Steve Ellis of the Washington, D.C., Taxpayers for Common Sense tells the Weekly. "It's an unseemly and inappropriate use of taxpayer money. It should be banned."

The Los Angeles City Council and the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors have no policies to prevent self-naming. Former Councilman Joel Wachs, who found the practice shameless, tried in 1998 to get the City Council to ban all future Monuments to Me. His chief of staff, Greg Nelson, says it's time for the City Council and Board of Supervisors to explicitly ban self-naming until members are permanently retired or, better yet, dead.

"The absence of a policy to guide how public facilities are named is a blank check for the politicians to name every [stationary object] after themselves," Nelson tells the Weekly.

"The politicians are getting things named after themselves for basically doing their jobs. Aren't their high salaries enough?"

LaBonge tells the Weekly he feels a building named for him is appropriate because of his long history working with the Santa Monica Boulevard school before he was elected. He says Supervisor Kenneth Hahn and Mayor Tom Bradley had buildings named for them during their terms in office.

But LaBonge says he understands why this is the right time to review the policy and perhaps adopt a new one.

"Guys like Kenny Hahn and Tom Bradley were giants in L.A. history, but I don't see any giants walking around L.A. now," LaBonge says. As chairman of the City Council's Arts, Parks, Health & Aging Committee, he adds, "I would be willing to conduct a review of our policy."

In 1995, the Orange County Board of Supervisors banned naming buildings after living members.

"It doesn't matter what Orange County does," Republican Antonovich tells the Weekly. "We don't need a policy like that."

His political opposite, Democrat Ridley-Thomas, agrees. "Orange County is free to do whatever it wants," Ridley-Thomas says.

Emboldened taxpayer groups argue that courthouses and parks and other edifices and outdoor spaces are providing permanent campaign billboards for lifelong pols like the 71-year-old Antonovich, who plans to run for a final four-year term in 2012.

"That's free, taxpayer-funded campaign advertising. It's wrong on so many levels," activist Ellis says. "It's a sneaky way of using their office to keep their incumbency. It smacks of self-aggrandizement. We elected them to serve us, not to build memorials to themselves."

Antonovich disagrees that the Antonovich signage dotting his district serves as permanent advertising, even suggesting — in all apparent seriousness — that it could hurt him: "If a voter has a bad experience in a courthouse named after me, that could be a political negative."

Antonovich has plenty of company in using taxpayer money to build his brand.

The glory hogs span the spectrum, from conservative Republicans like David Dreier (the $36 million Congressman David Dreier Water Treatment Facility in Baldwin Park) to liberal Democrats like supervisors Ridley-Thomas and Molina.

In every case, those who discussed their "honors" repeated a curious mantra: Parks and buildings were named after them — rather than after legitimate local heroes or lifelong civic volunteers — in a spontaneous gesture of gratitude from the people.

"I accepted the honor," Antonovich says of having his name on the $109 million, state-of-the-art Antelope Valley courthouse. "The judges and the communities of Palmdale and Lancaster wanted to recognize my hard work in getting that courthouse built."

Ridley-Thomas also was helpless against a tsunami of gratitude when he was leaving the City Council in 2002 and his rebuilt council office was named for him: "I didn't want to insult the community," he tells the Weekly. "I couldn't say, 'Thanks but no thanks.' That would have been ungracious."