CommentsGELFAND’S WORLD--Saturday was full of irony. The Los Angeles Times published an editorial that raised red flags about the way the city's elected officials are trying to sneak through a large pay raise for employees of the LA Department of Water and Power (LADWP). The Times had previously published a story by David Zahniser and Dakota Smith revealing the sordid details.
On that same Saturday, many of the city's neighborhood council activists gathered at City Hall to meet with some of our elected officials to talk about spending and taxation. It's an annual event called Budget Day. It is ostensibly a chance to get down to brass tacks about the city's financial condition, but what was lacking was substantive public discussion (much less protest) over the DWP increases. Considering that DWP salaries are a substantial fraction of the budget and that DWP raises will lead the way for increases in other municipal salaries, the DWP deal was something that should have been a major part of the agenda.
To close the circle of irony, an editorial writer from the Times was an invited speaker at Budget Day. She poured cold water on the festive mood by pointing out that the city's so-called structural deficit has not gone away and will continue to bedevil us. Meanwhile, members of the City Council were speaking glowingly of how much progress the city has made.
Yes, I'm exaggerating a little here. The City Council's Budget Committee chair Paul Krekorian spoke about the need to keep to sober budgeting since there will inevitably be an economic downturn. And yes, the city has managed to rebuild its reserve fund.
But still, we ought to be asking why the collective DWP salaries are going to increase by as much as a fifth within the next few years. Perhaps Krekorian was talking about holding the line on street repairs and storm drains rather than jawboning with the unions.
The mood at Budget Day was actually fairly positive. Part of that is justifiable: We don't have the kind of fiscal emergency today that we had in 2009. As Krekorian pointed out, the projected deficit has gone down from approximately one-fourth of the total city budget (back in 2008) to a mere fraction of that amount today. But those of us who remember the way city politics nearly sent us into municipal bankruptcy beginning in 2007 have reason to worry.
Let's remind ourselves. The City Council and mayor Villaraigosa agreed to a salary increase for city workers that was designed to total 25% over a few years. At the time, many of us (particularly in neighborhood councils) warned that such agreements were not sustainable.
We didn't know how right we were at the time, but it didn't take long to find out. When the big recession hit a year later, the city was pounded. The city took extreme measures, starting by paying workers to take early retirement. It cancelled every bit of routine maintenance it could. It also forced big departments such as the DWP, which have their own revenue sources (your electric and water bills), to take on workers from other city departments. This bit of accounting trickery moved costs out of the General Fund into the proprietary departments. Finally, the city got the salaried workers to forego some of the promised salary increases in the hope that the money would be returned at some point in the future.
Even then, the city was nearly forced into bankruptcy. It was a close thing.
Out of the financial turmoil of the moment, neighborhood councils found new impetus. The Los Angeles Neighborhood Council Coalition held a special emergency meeting (just one week after its first meeting of the year) and almost immediately adopted a more aggressive posture towards what it saw as a fairly limp response by city government.
It was a bold step forward for the neighborhood council system, one that was probably resented by some government officials. It's therefore not hard to recognize that the politicians understood the usefulness of putting a lid on neighborhood council activism. It did this by institutionalizing the neighborhood council clamor-- by allowing for an official (but limited) group of neighborhood council people to participate. Thus, the Budget Advocates. In this way, a few dozen advocates get a title and the city doesn't have to cope with the peasants storming the gates.
This leads to the following question that was mentioned in passing by the Times editorial and has also been brought up by the publisher of CityWatch: Where have the neighborhood councils been while this DWP salary increase has been negotiated? The times blames the lack inferentially on the mayor and his appointees, as if the neighborhood councils had been kept in the dark.
There is another, less flattering explanation. While the Budget Advocates have been toiling ceaselessly in meeting with city departments and then writing policy analyses, the councils at the neighborhood level have been slacking off. Occasionally, a neighborhood council will make a pro forma endorsement of the Budget Advocate recommendations, but this is a long way from scheduling a heart to heart talk with the City Council member who represents them.
And that, I think, is the crux of the matter. If neighborhood councils are to fulfill their role of being the peoples' lobbyists, then we have to consider the forces we are up against. To put it more bluntly, the City Council is in the back pockets of the developers and the municipal employee unions. Both groups donate to campaigns, and the unions have the additional clout that comes from being a large voter base. The mayor and your City Council representative would rather not cross the unions. That was the lesson of 2007. Unsustainable salary increases almost crashed the system, and would have, -- had everyone not gone into panic mode.
There are complicated questions here. Anybody who has read this column for any length of time will understand that I am entirely in favor of the American union movement recovering from its current doldrums. I call in particular for the creation of unions to represent white collar workers and part timers, who suffer under the current system of at-will employment and management abusiveness. I am completely in favor of municipal workers having a seat on their side of the table in contract negotiations.
I'm not in favor of them controlling both sides of the table.
The taxpayers are entitled to their own representation. When our elected officials are beholden to municipal employee unions (the same way they are beholden to developers) we get the government we now have. During the recession, city workers didn't face the mass layoffs that hit other sectors. City workers get paid very well compared to others in the unskilled and marginally skilled trades and, for the most part, enjoy career-long employment.
As the Times article and editorial point out, there are reasons for offering salary increases in a few hard-to-fill positions such as DWP linemen. Are those reasons credible? In particular, are we losing so many skilled workers that a salary increase would be justified? I don't think the answer is clear. For one thing, we have to balance the cost of recruiting and training new skilled workers -- perhaps a relatively small number, perhaps more -- with the overall economic effect on the city. We need to factor in the effect on the rest of the work force, who see what is going on at the LADWP and want to be counted in when it comes to salary increases.
Here is a story I heard from a city worker back in the pre-recession days. City workers at the clerk level often tried to transfer into DWP. Why? Because the salaries were substantially higher. You got paid a lot more for doing the same job. This difference has been a quiet but real source of tension (and not a little envy) in the city workforce for a long time.
Considering the longterm effects on the city's structural deficit and the message that a large DWP salary increase sends to other city workers, the question is at least deserving of a full fledged public debate. Every neighborhood council should be agendizing the question and making sure to invite its City Council representative to the party. That would begin to fulfill the reason neighborhood councils were invented.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
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