It’s time to rein in LA’s shameless nonprofit CEOs

Talk about unseemly mission creep.

The nonprofit Tarzana Treatment Centers was established decades ago to treat addiction in the Los Angeles area. Yet whistleblowers now describe an organization consumed with billing — not helping.

The California Post reported Monday that two former Tarzana employees detailed extreme pressure to put profits first, to the detriment of patients and taxpayers.

At the same time, Tarzana’s CEO, Albert Senella, collected $2.36 million in salary last year alone and lives large in a palatial $3.7 million, six-bedroom, eight-bathroom spread in Simi Valley.

What’s wrong with this picture?

An aerial image of CEO Albert Senella’s palatial $3.7 million, six-bedroom, eight-bathroom spread in Simi Valley. CA Post

LA area taxpayers should not be taken to the cleaners by nonprofit executives. And patient needs should not be subordinate to what appear to be personal financial interests.

Clearly, the city and county need to tighten spending controls and provide meaningful oversight of this and other nonprofits that collect millions of dollars from taxpayers each year. Mayor Karen Bass, the City Council and the county Board of Supervisors should also explore setting caps on nonprofit executive compensation tied to taxpayer money.

Mayor Karen Bass, the City Council and the county Board of Supervisors should also explore setting caps on nonprofit executive compensation tied to taxpayer money. Getty Images

This is hardly the only example of nonprofit CEO entitlement. In another recent example, Carol Adelkoff, the head of 1736 Family Crisis Center in LA, collected more than $1.6 million in pay over the past two years — while luxuriating in Hawaii.

Serving the downtrodden should be a noble calling, not a path to self-indulgence, and those who treat it as the latter should look for other lines of work.

According to internal documents and messages, the Tarzana whistleblowers wrote things like, “She [a supervisor] is telling me to lie about my billing” and “The only thing they f—ing care about is billing.” 

Yikes.

The insiders also described patients rushed through the process to generate maximum income, not healthy outcomes.

And there have been other red flags: In 2022, for instance, a county audit found “significant fiscal and administrative non-compliance issues” in a contract that paid Tarzana about $26 million over two years. Yet the taxpayer dollars keep right on flowing.

Is it any wonder the city and county spend nearly $3 billion a year on homelessness programs –– only to see more homelessness? Per the most recent official count, homelessness jumped 3.4% in the city and 1.2% in LA County.

LA officials need to end the homeless industrial complex that entrenches homelessness, dependency and dysfunction. Homeless and treatment nonprofits have an incentive not to fix the problem, but to sustain it (or worse) — because more suffering means more funding.

The sad thing about Tarzana is that LA desperately needs to shift away from its emphasis on “housing first,” which absurdly posits that plopping addicts in hotels, at vast taxpayer expense, will somehow solve the homeless crisis.

The city and county should instead address the causes of homelessness, which are often addiction and mental illness.

So “treatment first”? Yes, absolutely.

But not treatment that prioritizes cash grabs over rehab.

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