The Los Angeles City Council will consider Friday a motion by Councilman Dennis Zine to review the use of city resources in connection with this week's Michael Jackson memorial at Staples Center.
Zine filed the motion this week amid his public disagreement with the office of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa over the true cost to the city. He puts the cost at $3.9 million while the mayor's office has it at $1.4 million.
The gap results in part from the fact each side is using different criteria. Zine, for instance, is factoring in the salaries of all the Los Angeles Police Department officers who were deployed around Staples Center in case large crowd materialized. The mayor's office is considering only overtime costs -- not the salaries of officers who would have been on the job in any event.
Zine insisted yesterday that the mayor's office number "is not showing the true reflection of the personnel who were assigned to the event."
"You're coming in on your day off and I'm on my regular assignment, but we're both at the memorial -- that should be the true, honest, reliable number of bodies assigned to the event," said Zine, a former LAPD officer.
Not so, said mayoral spokesman Matt Szabo.
"The flaw in the councilman's estimate is he assumes -- absent the Michael Jackson memorial -- that there would be no officers in the streets of Los Angeles," he said. "We are looking at what it cost the city over and above what it would normally cost to provide for public safety."
Zine also has been involved in a public tiff with the management of AEG Live, stemming from his call that the company should defray the city's Jackson-related expenditures.
The Los Angeles County coroner's office, meanwhile, was reported Friday to have subpoenaed medical files from several doctors believed to have treated Jackson
A source familiar with the probe into Jackson's death on June 25 told the Los Angeles Times that the subpoenas asked for "any and all" of Jackson's medical records, "including radiology and psychiatric records."
One of the subpoenas was served on Dr. Arnold Klein, Jackson's dermatologist, the doctor's attorney told The Times.
"It was a standard form subpoena and we turned over medical records to the medical examiner in response," attorney Richard Charnley said.
Klein appeared on ABC's "Good Morning America" earlier this week and denied that he ever gave Jackson dangerous sedatives such as Diprivan, which was reportedly found inside the rented Holmby Hills estate where the singer was found unconscious and not breathing.
Los Angeles police Chief William Bratton said this week that the Police Department would determine if Jackson was a homicide victim, based in part on the coroner's ruling regarding cause of death.
The ruling will be made after the completion of toxicology tests and tests on a portion of Jackson's brain.
Although the Jackson family held two private services at Forest Lawn Hollywood Hills this week, it was still unclear where and when the singer be buried and if the brain tissue now in the possession of the coroner's office would be re-inserted into his skull prior to interment.
