Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass has proposed $293 million of departmental cuts in her fiscal 2024-25 budget as well as the elimination of thousands of vacant city positions to close a budget gap after revenues failed to meet expectations.
The mayor’s proposed
The proposal doesn’t include layoffs, according to a spokeswoman.
Bloomberg News
The departmental cuts include a 10% reduction in the budget for the mayor’s office, Bass said.
“We will continue to hire for critical positions including sanitation, street services, police officers, firefighters and more,” Bass said. “To be clear, there are thousands of vacancies that have been sitting on the books for years. We are eliminating those positions.
“This prioritizes core city services, using it as a reset, so our budgets are more apparent in getting the job done for Angelenos,” Bass said.
Szabo said the city was in good shape when it approved a roughly $13 billion budget in July 2023, which included reserves equal to 8% of the general fund. Six months later, expected revenues had failed to materialize.
“We are now projecting that revenues are coming in $180 million below target,” Szabo said. “Sales and business taxes remain constrained and city hotel taxes are below average in growth.”
The deficit was created by the missed revenues and increased expenses from items like raises to civilian employees and police officers, according to city leaders.
Raises approved by the City Council Wednesday for the city’s dozens of civilian employee unions would add $316 million to the budget in the next fiscal year, and grow to more than $1 billion annually by 2028, according to a
Bass said during the budget presentation that the city needs to pay a living wage, and it wasn’t paying people enough to afford to live in the city,
Szabo added that the greatest risk to the budget continues to be inflation and high interest rates.
The mayor’s budget will absorb sluggish revenues and rising costs and puts the city on a solid path toward surpluses in the out years, Szabo said.
The elimination of the vacant positions is essential to regaining a structural balance in the out years, Szabo said.
“Though the city will still face challenges in coming years and deficits in the near term,” Szabo said. “The city will turn those deficits into surpluses by 2028-29.”
“This structural balance and these future surpluses are only made possible by these modest and strategic reductions included in the mayor’s budget,” Szabo said. “My office strongly recommends adoption of the framework imposed.”
Though Bass described the budget as a maintenance budget, there are key areas she plans to grow.
“We are continuing our expanded approach to support the safety of our communities,” Bass said. “The budget maintains our current levels of investment that have strengthened gang prevention.”
It also retains the fire department’s emergency paramedic program, which she said represents the majority of the department’s calls.
She will also continue her massive push to solve the city’s dual homelessness and affordable housing crises.
The budget makes a $185 million investment in her Inside Safe program, a program that provides temporary housing for unhoused people, partly by placing them in hotel rooms. The program will “leverage its pilot phase to continue scaling the program, improving service delivery and better streamlining participants with their transition from the street to interim housing to permanent housing,” according to Bass’ budget statement.
The budget includes $4.1 million for a program that provides mobile pit stops and showers for unhoused people.
It allocates $4.4 million to fast-track zoning to expedite the construction of 16,000 units of affordable housing in the city.
The city has received $82.2 million for 21 projects across four rounds of Affordable Housing and Sustainable Communities grant funding to support affordable housing, transportation and climate in the city, according to the budget.
The mayor is also forming a new climate cabinet, so that the city continues to work toward achieving the goal of producing 100% clean energy by 2035, she said.
“But L.A. needs to change the way it budgets, so it hones in and delivers on its promise,” Bass said.
The first step will be a comprehensive analysis of all the city departments Bass has ordered; and the city will begin working on its next budget as soon as this year’s is completed, she said.
She is also creating a grant writing department in the CAO’s office.
“One thing I learned while I was in Congress is that Los Angeles leaves dollars on the table,” Bass said.