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GELFAND’S WORLD - On Tuesday evening, the neighborhood council Budget Advocates challenged the misstatements and deceptions coming from the city's current government over the mayor's proposed budget. Hosted by Budget Advocate cochairs Glenn Bailey and Jay Handal, the program involved speaker Jack Humphreville -- the same Jack Humphreville that you know from these CityWatch pages -- going through mayor Karen Bass's 2025-6 budget.
I'm not happy to have to dust off the old cliche, but it was not a pretty sight.
I won't try to do a comprehensive summary of Jack's talk, but you can find the data in his recent columns here and here and in the documents that you can find on the Budget Advocates web site, which you can find here.
Humphreville went through a list of the city's anticipated revenue streams and budgeted costs with considerable skepticism. For example, the city is probably underestimating the costs of upcoming lawsuit settlements, since the budgeted total is about a hundred million dollars less than the current year's anticipated loss. This means that the city will likely have to find additional money to pay for upcoming settlements, and it is not at all clear where that money will be found.
In order to come up with a budget that is nominally balanced, the anticipated revenues and expenditures have to match. There is room for a tiny amount of play through use of the city's reserve fund, but the city has already spent quite a bit of it. So the city's budget managers have found themselves forced to make overly optimistic estimates of revenues and expenditures. Admittedly, they have already made some painful cuts in standard upkeep and maintenance wherever they could, but absent an injection of cash coming from some new bond measure or parcel tax or a state government funded bailout, the city is at risk of running out of money.
As Jack and others have reminded you so many times previously, much of the problem was preventable. The city did not have to give in to salary demands from its workforce, at least at the level that it has been doing over the past twenty years. This year has been especially bad in terms of City Council irresponsibility.
Admittedly, it would have been hard for the city's leadership to foresee the Trump tariff mess in advance, but they didn't even get to the level of reasonable prudence that leaders are supposed to show.
So when you drive down the street and hit the same pothole, remember that the city did not have to take itself quite so far along the road to ruin and bankruptcy. This one is on the City Council and on a mayor who didn't know how to say No.
Remedies for the current mess: The short and the long, the legal vs the political:
As Humphreville and the Budget Advocates have explained, they have a list of proposals which include ideas which have been around for a long time and have basically been ignored by the City Council. For example, city budgets should be conceived of in two and four year increments, rather than the current practice of a new surprise budget coming in every spring.
Another rational proposal is that these longer-term budgets should consider anticipated salary increases.
There is one element of the proposal that I am going to question:
"The second recommendation is for the City Council to place a measure on the ballot that would prohibit the City from entering into any labor agreement that would create a current or future deficit. In determining whether there is a deficit, potential revenue sources such as new taxes would not be considered unless they were already approved by the voters. Importantly, the burden of proof will be on the City."
The first reason to differ is one of overall governing principle. I'm not in favor of creating artificial limits on legislative bodies which can come back to bite us at some future date. The whole idea behind representative government is that the voters get to make choices about the overall governing philosophy and to choose representatives who should be trusted to exercise that philosophy.
Let's not belabor that point, although I would point out that the late Kevin Drum was outspoken about it.
A minor point is that the proposal would be unusually difficult to enact, because the ballot wording would come from the City Council itself, meaning that exceptions and weasel wording will be part of it. Remember when a ballot initiative was created by the City Council which was supposedly about political reform, but instead snuck through an extension of term limits from two terms to three?
But the major point is that the current City Council is responsible for the current mess and should be held accountable.
But how do the voters do so?
Here's one idea. Any of you remember the "Half Off" proposal that a few of us floated a few years ago? Basically, it would insert the two words "one-half" into the section of the law which defines the salary for a City Council representative. Right now, the salary is simply defined according to the salary of a Superior Court judge.
So instead of making a couple hundred thousand, our City Council reps would have to get by on half that amount.
Or perhaps the organizing committee for the Half-Off ballot initiative might want to consider remaking the City Council into something more representative of the population as a whole, and might therefore change the salary from "One-Half" of a judge's salary to "One-Third" or even "One-Fourth," resulting in a City Council who enjoy a living wage but not a princely one.
If nothing else, the process of developing and circulating the petitions for the ballot measure would signal to the City Council representatives that somebody has been watching. Nothing signifies being held accountable like this kind of cut.
Another benefit of adopting "Two-Thirds-Off" would be a reduction in the number of career politicians who aim for the City Council because it is a way to make lots of money for 12 years and then enjoy a nice pension for the rest of their lives. I don't think that this is what the founders envisioned, but it is what we have at the moment.
There is one little problem with going ahead with this idea, if you want to call it that:
The measure would get on the ballot and be passed in a flash. Back when we were first talking about the idea, almost everybody we talked to answered, "Where do I sign?" Perhaps the members of the City Council should think about the fact that the residents of Los Angeles do not have to maintain them in the style to which they have become accustomed and, by collecting the petition signatures, can reduce them in rank and prosperity.
I bring up this now well-aged idea because the neighborhood councils and the budget advocates and pretty much every rational economic thinker have warned the city about its profligacy for many years, but without apparent effect. That is one other reason I'm skeptical about the City Council adopting the Budget Advocates approach. Maybe I'm wrong, but we'll see.
And one last whimsical thought aimed at Republicans and once-Republicans: It's too bad the party has gone over the cliff into a kind of social conservatism that the majority of California voters do not tolerate. What the government of Los Angeles could use would be a bit of fiscal conservatism to go along with our social liberalism. It doesn't have to be some extravagantly right-wing nonsense like we're seeing in Washington D.C. at the moment. It just has to be a little more realistic.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected].)
