As the Los Angeles City Council weighed its options to address a $208-million budget shortfall, Councilman Bernard C. Parks on Monday ordered the city\u2019s top budget analyst to prepare a plan that could include layoffs of police officers and firefighters. <\/p>\n
Last week, the city\u2019s Chief Administrative Officer Miguel Santana outlined plans for the elimination of as many as 1,500 city positions, but none of those cuts were in the Police Department or the offices of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa or City Council members.<\/p>\n
Building up the city\u2019s police force by more than 1,000 officers has been one of Villaraigosa\u2019s top priorities and he has enjoyed support from the City Council, though that support has waned as the city\u2019s budget crisis has deepened. <\/p>\n
Parks pointed out that the police and fire departments make up as much as 80% of the city\u2019s general fund budget and that without cuts in public safety, other city departments will be carrying the brunt of the city\u2019s budget crisis. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\u201cYou may have to use the word layoff and police and fire in the same sentence just to give us an idea of what those cost savings are,\u201d Parks told Santana. \u201cWe need to give the council the grimmest picture we have.\u201d <\/p>\n
Councilman Greig Smith said that when City Council members agreed to hire police officers in November, they expected that their agreement allowing 2,400 city workers to retire early would cover the cost. Instead, the city is now grappling with a tax revenue shortfall of $186 million.<\/p>\n
\u201cI, for one, as chairman of public safety, am never going to lay off firefighters to keep hiring cops,\u201d Smith said. <\/p>\n
In his budget report, Santana suggested eliminating 64 firefighter positions, but those firefighters were already expected to move to other vacancies in the field to ease overtime costs. <\/p>\n
The suggestion that the Police Department might face reductions brought a swift response from the mayor\u2019s office and the police union. <\/p>\n
Matt Szabo, one of the mayor\u2019s top deputies, noted that Villaraigosa\u2019s office has advanced a wide array of options for City Council consideration, including renegotiating salaries and benefits with labor unions, additional early retirements of city workers, consolidation of city departments and seeking private operators for the convention center, golf courses, parking garages and the Los Angeles Zoo. <\/p>\n
\u201cSolving this crisis is going to require the city to significantly refocus its resources on core priorities, and cutting the Police Department is not a priority that the mayor shares,\u201d Szabo said.<\/p>\n
The head of the city police officers union said reducing the size of the LAPD would be shortsighted, especially since the larger force has helped reduce violent crime in the city to levels not seen for decades.<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u201cIt makes you wonder what they\u2019re thinking,\u201d said Paul Weber, president of the Los Angeles Police Protective League. \u201cKeep in mind, we were cut last year by over $130 million. We\u2019ve gotten to the point where we\u2019re not even buying new police cars anymore.\u201d <\/p>\n
— Maeve Reston and Phil Willon\u00a0reporting from City Hall\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As the Los Angeles City Council weighed its options to address a $208-million budget shortfall, Councilman Bernard C. Parks on Monday ordered the city\u2019s top budget analyst to prepare a plan that could include layoffs of police officers and firefighters. Last week, the city\u2019s Chief Administrative Officer Miguel Santana outlined plans for the elimination of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4135,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-263644","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263644","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4135"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=263644"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263644\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=263644"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=263644"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=263644"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}