LA Mayor Swings and Misses In First Budget at Bat

POLITICS-I’m the last one to point a finger at someone else’s budget. The wife won’t even tell me where she hides our checkbook. 

Still, with great fanfare, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti rolled out his first budget, and I’m still looking for the austerity.  

Last year LA’s budget called for $7,685,509,310 in spending. The new mayor’s new budget calls for $8,100,115,065 in spending. That’s an increase of $414,605,758, and I know this is accurate because I ran it past the wife. 

Garcetti claims his budget is “gimmick-free” and will close the $242 million dollar shortfall he inherited from a budget he voted for while still a member of the City Council. But I think the mayor is being too modest. If he can close a quarter of billion dollar shortfall by increasing spending by the better part of half a billion, that’s not “gimmick-free”, that’s miraculous. 

Of course, I’m the guy whose budget works something like this: I pay bills until I run out of money and then don’t answer the phone for a month. 

The mayor’s budget includes $27.5 million more for the Los Angeles Police Department and $11 million more for the Los Angeles Fire Department. Libraries will stay open an extra eight hours a week and have more staff. 

An extra $20 million is going into street and sidewalk repair which, given the current state of our roads, is the budgetary equivalent of fishing coins out from under the sofa cushions. But who knows? Maybe some of that money will find its way to your street? Someone has to win the lottery. 

What’s missing from the mayor’s plan is any proposal to cut the city’s notoriously onerous business taxes. 

Despite campaigning on a pledge to make L.A. more business friendly and dangling the prospect of a business tax rollback as recently as February, the best Garcetti has come up with is a promise to start phasing out part of the business taxes in 2016. 

Swing and a miss. 

The mayor calls this a “responsible” budget and maybe he’s right. But wouldn’t it be exciting if for once we had a mayor who gambled on the big fix rather than Band-Aids? Garcetti was elected to undo the damage of years of irresponsible spending and neglected infrastructure. The fix means nothing but tough choices. Nobody makes friends with austerity. 

But nobody in their right mind is going to relocate their business to Los Angeles as long as we treat businesses like ATM machines. 

Mayor Garcetti was a featured speaker at the recent UCLA Anderson Forecast that ranked L.A. 32nd out of the top 32 metro areas for job growth. Dead last. Worse than Cleveland and Detroit. We’re in desperate need of a new attitude and what we got instead was a cautious repackaging of the same old attitude. 

With a new mayor presenting a new budget, Los Angeles has a chance to rebrand itself as pro-business. Unfortunately the mayor has opted for the safe route: more money for cops, fire and libraries and more promises to the business community of better days ahead. 

On the same day the mayor introduced his budget the County Board of Supervisors released a $26.1 billion whopper that barely raised an eyebrow. 

Again, I’m the last person you want messing with your budget. Budget rent-a-car hangs up on me when I call. But with Tax Day fresh in our minds, it’s hard not to wonder about these numbers: $8.1 billion for the City of LA, $26.1 billion for the County of LA, and $6.7 billion for the Las Angeles Unified School Disrict, and nobody’s ever happy. No matter how much we spend, someone always says it’s not enough. 

Is it possible we simply can’t afford us?

 

(Doug McIntyre is morning radio host at KABC and writes for the Daily News … where this column was first posted. Doug can be reached at: [email protected])

-cw

 

 

 

 

 

 

CityWatch

Vol 12 Issue 32

Pub: Apr 18, 2014