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Westwood Village merchants and property owners continue to feel frustrated with their Business Improvement District, which, among other problems, appears to be missing money and is having trouble paying off creditors, including UCLA.

Board members said Westwood’s now-defunct BID, an organization formed to improve Village business conditions, cannot account for hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding collected for “capital improvements.”

Each year approximately $220,000 was supposed to be deposited into this account to be drawn upon for capital improvements, such as new park benches.

But three years worth of this money is unaccounted for, and upwards of $750,000 may be missing, according to board members and community activists.

At present the BID is barely operating with the small amount of money it has left and, to compensate, has been making cuts in personnel and Village services.

One of the services eliminated on Oct. 31 was the Community Service Center on Broxton Avenue, manned by a UCPD officer and three UCLA community service officers.

Though the UCPD paid for Officer Robert Sadeh to be stationed in the center, UCLA fronted the wages of the students working as CSOs, who managed the office on rotating shifts 35 hours per week.

UCPD spokeswoman Nancy Greenstein said the BID owes the UCPD around $15,000 for the CSOs.

“We believe we will be paid,” Greenstein said, adding that the BID has always been behind in payments.

“A really good service will not be provided in the Village anymore – that’s my issue,” Greenstein said.

The Westwood BID was formed in 1995 in order to improve business conditions in the then economically staggering village. Some of its goals were to provide clean-up services such as street and sidewalk sweeping and tree trimming.

Despite meeting these goals, the BID failed to find ways to alleviate the Village’s desperate lack of parking.

There had been many other problems within the BID, including a violation of the Brown Act, a state law prohibiting secret legislation by public organizations, in September.

In early September, after hearing numerous complaints through an investigation lasting several months, Los Angeles City Councilman Jack Weiss, whose fifth district includes Westwood, decided not to endorse the BID’s renewal, effectively killing its charter.

Since then the BID’s management staff and board of directors have been trying to wind operations down, but are scheduled to continue providing services until June. But the BID was ordered to stop collecting assessments from properties within its district, thereby restricting it to spending money already collected.

Some board members said being behind in payments to UCLA is only symptomatic of a flawed institution. They blame the BID’s management staff for not conducting independent audits for the past three years, which it did every year before 1999, and for working with only a handful of board members when deciding to close down operations.

“Those who were doing things without the knowledge and consent of the rest of the board didn’t know what they were doing,” said Jeff Abell, board member and manager of Sarah Leonard Fine Jewelers.

Bob Walsh, the BID’s executive director, resigned in October, and since then, most of the BID’s administrative staff have been laid off.

During a meeting on Oct. 31, exasperated board members advocated conducting an independent audit to determine if all assessment funds collected by the City of Los Angeles were deposited into the BID’s account.

Properties within the district paid fees to the city government, which then dispersed the funds back into the BID’s expense account.

This Wednesday at 3 p.m. some members of the board and other interested parties are holding a meeting at Jerry’s Famous Deli to discuss forming a new BID.

But doing so will require the confidence of Village merchants and property owners involved, which could prove to be a difficult task, Abell said.