Robbing Angelenos to Pay City Hall Pet Projects

Despite record revenues during years prior to the pandemic plus a $1.3 billion gift from the Feds, the City of Los Angeles continues to face serious financial challenges. 

Yes, it suffered from the fiscal impact of the virus. 

But our current situation is primarily due to the failure of the City Council and Mayor to address the City’s finances over the previous seven years of plenty, during which the City received record revenues. 

They vowed to and have had plenty of opportunities to balance the budget. But didn’t. 

Instead, there was always something more on which to spend our money. Beyond the budget. 

They kowtowed to the leaders of the public sector unions and consistently made concessions that favored real estate developers and other special interests. 

To ensure a reasonable future for our children, the City needs to balance its budget and attain a more secure financial footing before another pandemic or recession. 

How the City spends its money should certainly reflect our values, a point that Black Lives Matter and many other progressive groups have made loud and clear over the past year with their requests for enhanced social services. 

However, too many of those services are the responsibility of the County. Not the City. 

The Los Angeles City budget is primarily responsible for public safety – police, fire and emergency response – and for infrastructure – power, water, roads and sidewalks, parks and public restrooms. 

Much as our elected officials may want to spend money on economic justice social programs, that is not in their purview. Their first priority to City residents is to ensure public safety and to maintain its infrastructure along with physical services such as trash collection and utilities. 

Only when those basic needs are met will there be space for improvements. Only in a safe and structurally sound city, can focus shift to important societal changes. 

The City’s budget is an important document in that it lays out HOW Los Angeles will provide those services. And the reality is, that to maintain quality of life for all Angelenos, the City must budget for many years into the future not just the coming fiscal year. 

This year the City needs to restore services to pre-pandemic levels by rebuilding and re-staffing many of its departments, departments which were eviscerated by across-the-board cuts.

Right now, the City needs to rebuild our failing infrastructure and perform necessary maintenance on the rest. Those will require capital spending that can’t be covered in a single year’s budget. But the price of neglect is significantly higher than current replacement costs. 

But first we need to know the extent of the damage. 

The City Planning department has yet to establish the infrastructure monitoring unit mandated in 1996. Nor, since 1999, has it prepared a report on LA’s infrastructure and public services so we have no idea of the extent of the City’s fiscal exposure. Except that it’s in the billions. 

Right now the City needs to improve public safety. This includes cracking down on over-zealous policing and engaging more positively with all Angelenos. 

We need to address the existential danger of climate change to keep Los Angeles livable. 

We need to address the suffering of our neighbors living on our streets like in some third-world city. This year’s budget allocated almost $1 billion just to combat homelessness. Fifteen percent of the City’s General Fund is not sustainable. 

We need to invest in real solutions, not prop up the status quo of short term developer incentive programs. 

Furthermore, developers are also profiting from escalating housing costs which is driving affordability of housing for most out of our City entirely. This will only get worse now Newsom has signed SB 9 and SB 10. 

More than a handful of City officials are already in deep trouble for profiting off developer kickbacks and more have been implicated. 

We need personal accountability for every elected official and every employee whose actions generate litigation and/or monetary settlements. 

We need to fix the causes of accidents – our streets and sidewalks are obstacle courses for cars, pedestrians and bicyclists, trees fall due to lack of care. 

One $3 million claim averted by properly repairing a single street, will pay for numerous proactive repairs across the City. 

We need enforceable ethics regulations and a Commission which will kick ass, and deter malfeasance which may lead to more claims. 

We need them to eradicate the power of lobbyists and enforce better campaign finance laws. 

At City Hall, too often budgeting becomes a competition to get their piece of the money without an overview of the multiple interactions required to make the City work. 

Most of our elected officials and the department personnel act in good faith but in ensuring they get to keep their piece of the pie, it has become too easy to lurch from year to year putting Band-Aids on what went before instead of excising the cancer. 

We need financial accountability and transparency. 

We need to increase efficiency, downsize bureaucracy, remove redundancies and provide sustainable services to meet the needs of all Angelenos. 

We need to resolve pension costs and their impact on the budget. 

We need a priority ranking of core City services so there is a clear plan for the future and concrete criteria to track success. 

We need to ensure the Reserve Fund will see the City through the next emergency. 

We need a budgeting system that prioritizes long term planning and avoids the bad decisions of the blinkered one-year-at-a-time approach. 

We need a qualified City Manager who is empowered to work effectively and not hamstrung by petty politics and rivalries arising from the current siloization of the City departments. 

We need the City to reflect our values by respecting its budgetary obligations and delivering the services we are due in a respectful manner. 

We need to call on the boys and girls at City Hall to play nicely in the sandbox. And to stop robbing our children by encumbering their future.

The foregoing is a lightly edited version of a presentation by Liz Amsden at the Congress of Neighborhoods on September 25. A Critical Analysis of the City’s Budget by Jack Humphreville can be read here. 

(Liz Amsden is an activist from Northeast Los Angeles with opinions on much of what goes on in our lives. She has written extensively on the City's budget and services as well as her many other interests and passions. In her real life she works on budgets for film and television where fiction can rarely be as strange as the truth of living in today's world.)