Budget battles divide a normally unified L.A. City Council

The 15-member Los Angeles City Council is well known for moving in lock step, approving large-scale development projects, lucrative labor agreements and even a boycott of Arizona with little or no dissent.

But this year’s protracted fight over City Hall layoffs has shone a spotlight on the divide that separates the council’s two ideological wings.

The council’s budget hawks have sought to erase a $485-million shortfall by relying on the revenues that are in hand, even if that means dramatically cutting the workforce. The budget doves want to shield jobs and services at a time of high unemployment by banking on money from initiatives that are still in the works.

On Monday, the hawks gained the upper hand, finding enough votes to press ahead with a plan to eliminate 761 city jobs starting July 1 unless the unions find a way to close the gap through financial concessions or other strategies.

Since then, workers with the influential Coalition of L.A. City Unions, which threw its weight behind the doves early on, have been dropping hints that the budget vote would be viewed as a litmus test by its 22,000 members. The next election, one that could feature as many as six incumbent council members, is less than 10 months away.

The council’s hawkish faction has four members, all of whom sit on the Budget and Finance Committee. The group has two council members from the more conservative west San Fernando Valley, Greig Smith and Dennis Zine, and two whose districts cover much of South Los Angeles, Jan Perry and Bernard C. Parks.

Smith and Zine are the council’s only Republicans. Parks, a former police chief, is known for his more conservative views on economic issues, such as rent control. Perry aligns herself with the city’s business leaders.

Wary after years of deficits, the group repeatedly warned their colleagues against relying on rosy economic projections, a view summed up by Smith during a passionate speech on the council floor.

“I don’t want to spend another year like we did last year, where we sat here every single month making corrections and adjustments to the budget because it was wrong, because it was based on concepts and assumptions that were wrong,” he said. “We did that last year and we paid for it dearly.”

At the other end of the spectrum are the council members most vigorously opposed to layoffs and reduced services: Paul Koretz, who hails from the affluent Westside; Jose Huizar, who represents much of the heavily Latino Eastside; Richard Alarcon, from the northeast San Fernando Valley; and Janice Hahn, whose district runs from Watts to San Pedro.

Hahn, Koretz and Alarcon have deep ties to labor unions. Huizar, a former school board member, said he saw himself as a centrist until he realized how much his working-class district would be affected by the proposed cuts to library hours and park programs.

“I’m not usually a dove,” he said. “I always considered myself middle of the road. But on this one, the Budget and Finance Committee left very little room for dialogue on saving city services.”

Alarcon said he still hopes to find other alternatives for cutting the budget, such as offering early retirement to 100 city employees. He argued that the hawks discredited themselves earlier this year by demanding 4,000 job cuts, only to retreat later when such a sizeable cut was deemed unnecessary.

“The budget committee for the last two years has been screaming ‘The sky is falling’,” he said. “They’ve always taken the most conservative approach, and their numbers have not been documented.”

In the final days before the vote, the remaining seven council members were forced to choose sides. Council President Eric Garcetti went with the hawks but attempted to soften their budget proposal.

Councilman Herb Wesson, long viewed as a challenger to Garcetti for the council presidency, sided with the doves and unveiled a plan for closing the gap without layoffs and furloughs. In a strange twist, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa also cast his lot with the doves, asking the council at the last minute to delay a vote on the very job cuts he had proposed.

The council ignored his request.

The divide between the two factions was obvious as they debated Villaraigosa’s plan to save money by closing the Northeast Animal Shelter, a facility in Mission Hills.

With fewer cages, the Animal Services Department faced the prospect of euthanizing anywhere from 2,400 to 4,000 additional cats and dogs, a hot-button issue for many city residents. Koretz called for the facility to stay open for six months and promised to drum up private donations to cover the gap.

“I think there’s a lot more fundraising potential than people think out there,” he told his colleagues.

Wesson said his budget plan would keep the facility open by raising animal license fees to generate $2.4 million. But city officials said the higher fees would only provide $600,000 over the next 12 months, a figure based on previous fee hikes.

The hawks on the council voiced dismay, warning that if the money failed to materialize, the city would have to close the Northeast shelter and a second animal shelter on Jan. 1.

“If you want to take a gamble today and roll the dice, by all means go ahead,” Smith said. “But know this: If you’re wrong, it’s not just an adjustment. It means closing two facilities in January.”

“Rolling the dice?” Alarcon shot back. “We’re politicians. All of us have rolled the dice at one point.”

The dispute was resolved when Councilman Tony Cardenas proposed that parking tickets go up by $5, not the $3 originally proposed, as a way of paying for the shelter. The council’s budget hawks gave their consent, saying that those were dollars they could count on.

david.zahniser@latimes.com

Times staff writer Phil Willon contributed to this report.