Debt Collection is Hotter than the Oscars in L.A. Right Now

It’s hot, hot, HOT in Los Angeles this week. I mean seriously—who among you can say that you’re not still suffering (delightfully suffering) just a little bit from Post-Oscar Fever? Between Billy Crystal’s ever-expanding jowls and the 5’9” slit in Angelina’s gown and Rooney Mara in white… and with eyebrows! All I can say is that LA has got me en fuego right now! Am I right?

But the glitter and glamour of Hollywood isn’t the only thing that’s hot in Cali this week. As the philosopher Snoop Dogg once said, “With so much drama in the L.B.C. it’s kinda hard bein’ Snoop D-O-double-G.” You know who else it’s kinda hard to be? Eric Garcetti, former LA City Council president and current Council member, who sponsored a motion… to convene a body… and to appoint an “inspector general”… whose job it would be to take a hard look at addressing LA’s debt collection efforts to combat the city’s nearly half a billion dollar receivables management catastrophe.

But according to an editorial in The Los Angeles Times this week, Garcetti and the Council and the Mayor’s Office haven’t exactly lit a fire under the monumental task of collecting the roughly $541 million “that absconders and rip-off artists refuse to pay.” The Times asks, “So how much money has the inspector general recovered?” The answer: zero, nada, bupkis. And why? Because the I.G.’s appointment is still being held up (for various reasons) while other conversations are being held to further investigate the problem. The Times ultimately thinks this humongous debt problem will finally be resolved in about 367,498 years. And something about giant sloths. Gasp.

To be fair, Garcetti is preternaturally dreamy. And–if this photo is to be taken seriously–his role in creating the position of an inspector general may have grown out of prior experience with “inspections.” (Okay–that’s just my excuse for creating a fancy Blingee out of a photo of Garcetti in a manhole. But he is dreamy though, is he not? Yes. Dreamy.)

L.A. City Council Member Garcetti Inspects a Manhole

It seems there are two easy solutions and one hard solution to the problem. Let’s tackle the low hanging fruit first.

Easy

Step One: Remove Los Angeles City Council members’ heads from… well, you know. And while we’re at it, start tearing down a whole mess of bureaucratic roadblocks within city government that are delaying progress on a very important budgetary issue.

Step Two: Outsource the recovery of that massive chunk of change (bad debt) to a reputable municipal debt collection agency with the experience and scale to handle the problem effectively.