The first time I met the late Bill Thomas was on a union picket line in front of our Associated Press office in the Capitol in Sacramento. Our small Wire Service Guild unit had been picketing with the tacit approval of the governor, Ronald Reagan, who had led a couple of strikes himself while president of the Screen Actors Guild.

Running out of money and fearing the strike would be long, I had asked Tom Goff, the Los Angeles Times Sacramento bureau chief, about the possibility of going to work for the paper. A few days later, he brought Bill over to the picket line to meet me. I was embarrassed by the picket sign hanging around my neck. (Our arrangement prevented us from carrying signs with sticks). We went out for a drink and I enjoyed his company, especially his relaxed and confident manner. The strike ended, and we all went back to work. But a few months later, Bill offered me a job and I took my place in the Times newsroom, somewhat overwhelmed to be part of the talented staff he had assembled.

Bill let those talents flower, encouraging them to follow their ideas, which ranged from serious to zany, while guiding the writers in a subtle but strong way. He let me pursue stories he had doubts about. He would say it turned out ok when I finished one of those stories. This was a high compliment from him. And when the story appeared on A-1, that was another form of a Bill Thomas compliment.

Sometimes, Bill as metro editor and editor would give me assignments. Early in my career there, his friend Matt Byrne, who had been U.S. Attorney, was being denied appointment to the vacant district attorney job even though he was clearly best qualified. Bill told me to go up to the Hall of Administration and find out why. I learned that a powerful supervisor, Ernie Debs, opposed Byrne. As a federal prosecutor, Byrne had gone after a friend of Debs for running a card cheating operation at the Friars Club. Bill ran my story even though it made the Supes, longtime sacred cows at the Times, look bad.

In 1972, I was set to cover the presidential election when Bill, by then the editor, pulled me off. I hired you to cover LA politics, not run around the country, he said.

That thrust me into the dirtiest election I've ever covered -- races for district attorney and county supervisor. The latter was a real tough one. Supervisor Warren Dorn, a pet of Buff Chandler, publisher Otis Chandler's mother, was opposed by Baxter Ward, a former television news anchor. From my experience on the Debs' story, I knew Bill wanted this covered honestly. As the campaign began, I went down to his office and asked him if he had any advice. Don't make any mistakes, he said. That was the last I heard from him about the election until it was over. Dorn lost and I think my stories helped push him on the downward path. I went to see Bill in his office when it was over and asked him how he thought it went. He said he had to put his finger in the dike a few times but he thought it worked out well.

When he was editor we would sometimes go out for after-work drinks at the Redwood. He sat at the same table and was served by the same waitress, Alice. He enjoyed my company because I loved his stories about the old days at the Mirror and I never asked him for anything.

When he retired, we occasionally had lunch at Lakeside, his country club. After I was appointed city editor, I always asked for advice. He told me how he made it a point to circulate through the news room, taking to reporters at their desks rather than in his office. He told me how he encouraged the shy and insecure to come up ideas and how he dealt with the talented big egos. He said never go out to lunch with a reporter. "It takes too much time and you give away too much," he said.

As he got older, he couldn't get around much, and I'd drive to his home in the Valley for visits. He wanted to know all the gossip and news about the paper and, a fervent liberal, liked talking politics.

After he died, I thought about my great experience of our years together, back to our picket line meeting and our drink at the Senator Hotel in Sacramento many years ago.

The story behind the Los Angeles County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas’ garage-home-office controversy is one familiar to millions---a beef over home remodeling.

For those who have not been following the Los Angeles Times investigation into the garage caper, here’s a summary: Last month, reporters Jack Leonard and Paul Pringle reported that the county installed a home security system for the garage, which was being turned into an office. The reporters portrayed the project as a boondoggle, with a wall torn down for the installation of the wiring, which also required a trench dug adjacent to the garage. This work, they implied, might not have been needed. They also maintain the county has only grudgingly and slowly given them information and Ridley-Thomas has refused to talk to them.

Friday, Nancy Sullivan, Times vice president for communications called to say that four garage walls, not one, were involved in the job.

Overcoming these obstacles, the reporters found out that a contractor charged the county $6,239 for the project. Then Ridley-Thomas reimbursed the county $3,759 for an air conditioner, refrigerator and a flat screen television installed at the same time.

Beyond that, the story of the wall, or walls I should say, becomes muddy, like neighbors telling of remodeling their kitchen.

Ridley-Thomas told me that when he notified county officials he intended to move his home office, including his county computer, into the garage, they said they would have to revamp his county-supplied home security system. In addition, they said they, themselves, would have to move his county computer, with its high-speed Internet connection, into the new office. They had to do this, they said, to protect the county computer system from hackers.

Besides linking up with the Internet, the high-speed connection reaches the sheriff’s office and other security agencies, Ridley-Thomas said. Each task requires wiring. In addition, the alarm system needs a wire to draw power from the home supply. So there must be wiring for a few purposes—high-speed Internet connection, law enforcement notification for emergencies and power for the computer and the security alarm system, Ridley-Thomas explained.

County employees and the contractors looked at the garage and said they wouldn’t be able to install so much wiring behind the walls without ripping them out. Since the garage was 30 years old, they said they couldn’t find replacements for the old wooden walls. Let’s hang dry wall over the wiring and paint it, they said. They preferred that solution to hanging the wires on outside of the old wall and covering them with molding. Fine, replied Ridley-Thomas.

Reporters Leonard and Pringle quoted a number of home security experts who said there was no need to rip out the wall to install wiring for the security system. “Ripping the walls out? That’s absolutely ridiculous,” said Nigel Smithers, Southern California general for Absolute Security Alarms. Ridley-Thomas is angry about the coverage and called me at home, hoping I would look into it. He said it was always clear that he would pay for the air conditioner, television and refrigerator. “This was above board, there was no attempt to hide anything, it was completely appropriate and legitimate,” he said.

The real dispute is over the amount of wiring needed and whether the wall should have been replaced. Was so much wiring required that the contractors had to rip down the wall? Would a cord from Home Depot sufficed? Was taxpayer money wasted? In that situation, if a contractor told me this about my home office, I might call in a contractor for a second opinion. But Ridley-Thomas, required to use the county for the job, didn’t have that option.

As a final note, I asked the Times for comment and received this e mail from Times Vice President Sullivan:

“The Times’ reporting on the installation of a taxpayer-funded security system at the home of Los Angeles County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas has been precise and fair. Although Ridley-Thomas declined repeated requests for comment and information, the articles have reflected his side of the story as fully as possible, based on information from other county officials and Ridley-Thomas’ own statements to other media. The Times has consistently reported that Ridley-Thomas reimbursed the county for part of the cost of the project. No factual error in our reporting has been brought to our attention. We continue to seek a complete accounting of taxpayer expenditures on the project and will report on the controversy as new information becomes available.”

I replied, “Thank you for your statement, which I will include in my column for LA Observed...

“But I'm not satisfied with it and I don't think readers would be either. The Times is the foremost public-private institution in our community. Its reporters and editors should answer questions from the public and other journalists about their news gathering--allowing, of course, for the need to protect confidential sources. With its great influence, the paper and its journalists should be accountable to its many readers. Saying merely that the reporting has been precise and fair does not meet this standard…”

Editorial writer Kerry Cavanaugh raised serious questions on latimes.com about Mayor Eric Garcetti’s appointment of former Department of Water and Power General Manager David Wiggs as assistant general manager in charge of the public utility’s electric system.

In a Feb. 1 post, Cavanaugh wrote “it’s so odd that Garcetti, who has made transparency and DWP reform his signature issues, would bring back a guy who ran the utility during a scandal involving financial shenanigans and ethical lapses.”.

She was referring to an intense period in the administration of then-Mayor Jim Hahn, who served from 2001 until Antonio Villaraigosa defeated him in 2005. It was a time of rough politics that helped shape the Los Angeles of today. Hahn dumped Police Chief Bernard Parks and brought in Bill Bratton, who reformed the department, doing much to ease racial tensions. And Hahn successfully opposed secession of the San Fernando Valley, preserving the present city boundaries.

It took great amounts of money to defeat secession. Hahn was also raising money for his re-election campaign. It was a fevered time and one of the mainstays of the pressured Hahn political operation was a public relations firm, Fleishman Hillard. Doug Dowie, former managing editor of the Daily News, headed the firm’s Los Angeles office. Fleishman, Cavanaugh notes, received $3 million a year from the DWP “and the firm worked closely with (then General Manager) Wiggs, even writing his talking points when he spoke to the city council.” Ultimately,Dowie was sentenced to 3 ½ years in federal prison for defrauding taxpayers by overcharging the DWP. Wiggs wrote a letter to the court praising Dowie, saying, “I had complete trust in Doug, and if I were to run a company again I would not hesitate to seek out and hire Doug.”

Wiggs was involved in another controversial matter while general manager, according to DWP watchdog Jack Humphreville, a neighborhood council activist. He blogged on the CityWatch web site that Wiggs signed off on the deal that has sent $40 million in DWP public funds to two shadowy organizations run by the DWP and the union representing most department workers. Union chief Brian D’Arcy has refused Garcetti’s demand to tell how the money is spent.

Why would Garcetti give a job to Wiggs if he knew his background? Another oddity is how Wiggs’ appointment was announced—in a sentence at the very end of a press release on Anaheim city manager Marcie Edwards’ nomination for DWP general manager. Possibly Garcetti didn’t want anyone to notice. And did he consult Edwards before giving the important job to Wiggs?

This may seem like small time stuff to the many people not obsessed with city hall. But nitty gritty politics and the bureaucracy are what run the place. That’s why this is important—and why it is distressing that Garcetti, a big picture guy, seems to have been indifferent to these very important details.