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LA Mayor declares fiscal emergency
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Listen courtesy of Pacifica Radio.
Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa sent a letter to the City Council today, urging them to declare a fiscal emergency.
The Mayor has proposed layoffs, furloughs and voluntary pay-cuts to make up the half a billion dollar budget shortfall.
Layoffs and mandatory furloughs are no longer an option, but a necessity, he wrote.
The Mayor is now urging the council to approve a thousand layoffs, up from the four hundred he proposed earlier in the year.
At the downtown Biltmore Hotel today, Villaraigosa attended Town Hall Los Angeles, one of many town hall-styled meetings the Mayor has attended to rally support for his budget reforms.
The Mayor says the fiscal crisis is growing to unanticipated proportions.
“If we were to resolve this current budget deficit, through shared sacrifice, cuts in services, new revenues… if we were to resolve this, next year, we’re going to face a deficit of 560 million dollars,” he said.
That ballooning deficit has the mayor projecting thousands of possible layoffs, an unprecedented move in LA history.
“The city’s never laid off more than nine people. And those nine people were laid off in 1984.”
The Mayor tied the city budget woes in with the state’s fiscal crunch. He insisted that passage of propositions 1A-F would help keep his latest layoff proposal, 1000 city employees by July 1st, from ratcheting higher. He said, “If the state propositions fail, this number will only get bigger.”
Villaraigosa said layoffs would include management as well as staff in most departments of the city.
Within 30 days, the mayor says he'll implement a furlough plan that requires city workers, except police and firefighters, to take 26 unpaid days of leave sometime in the coming fiscal year.
At Town Hall Los Angeles in the Biltmore Hotel today the Mayor took a question on his commitment to more police officers despite the fiscal crisis:
“At one time you said that regardless of the situation that you’re not going to reduce the level of the police department. Is that still possible today?”
“I have committed to hiring a thousand net police officers by 2010. By August we should be at 10,000 officers for the first time in our history. Why that is important; this is the most under-policed big city in the US .”
The Mayor’s budget does call for about a 7 percent cut in the LAPD budget.
A civilian hiring freeze has kept sworn officers off the streets, and behind desks, performing work that civilian workers could do at about half the cost.
But in an effort to keep Los Angeles’ bond rating high, currently the highest rated among the five largest cities in the nation, city workers with SEIU 721 fear the Mayor and City Council will make drastic short-term cuts and layoffs instead of longer-term money-saving alternatives.
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Mayor Villaraigosa
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