Villaraigosa plans to keep hiring cops while cutting civilian jobs

Even as city officials plan to shed 1,000 jobs to patch a nearly $200-million budget gap, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa intends to continue hiring police officers, a top aide said Thursday.

Deputy Chief of Staff Matt Szabo said Villaraigosa wants to keep recruiting enough officers to replace those who resign or retire -- leaving the Police Department with 9,963 sworn officers -- as he and the City Council press ahead with major reductions elsewhere.

“I think there’s consensus on that concept,” Szabo said.

Villaraigosa and five council members tried to display unity Thursday by releasing a letter calling for the job cuts. Yet at least two council members who signed the document, Bernard C. Parks and Jan Perry, said the city also needs to halt police hiring to balance the budget.

“I don’t think you can avoid it,” Parks said at a panel discussion hosted by the Central City Assn., a downtown business group. The session was titled “Is L.A. On the Road to Bankruptcy?”

“You don’t continue to hire more people when you have people taking furloughs,” said Perry, at a separate event.

Parks and Perry made their remarks hours after the city’s top budget analyst revealed that midyear tax revenue is $186 million lower than expected. Tax revenue has declined by double digits for four straight quarters, the worst drop since the Great Depression, City Administrative Officer Miguel Santana said.

To deal with the downturn, Villaraigosa and council members have agreed to slash payroll costs by allowing 2,400 civilian employees to retire up to five years early. But the city’s budget picture is so dire that Santana predicted 1,000 jobs would need to be eliminated, in addition to the 1,000 mentioned in Villaraigosa’s letter, over the next two years to keep the city afloat.

“Our revenues are not going to catch up to the costs of our pension system and our salaries and benefits. [They’re] just not,” he said.

Szabo said hundreds of layoffs would probably be avoided if the city allowed additional employees to take early retirement. Or they could be moved to jobs not paid for by the city’s general fund, which covers basic services including public safety. City leaders would also begin looking at services that can be done more cheaply by private contractors, he said.

“Our job is to make sure the job gets done, not necessarily to make sure it’s done by a city employee,” Szabo said.

That concept drew fire from a spokesman for the Coalition of L.A. Unions, which represents 22,000 city workers. Outsourcing city jobs would do little to solve the city’s fiscal crisis and is not “structural change,” said Victor Gordo, secretary-treasurer for the Laborers’ International Union of North America Local 777.

“All it does is take money from employees and opens the door to giving it to private contractors, and in the end, it’s the people of Los Angeles who will be left holding the bag,” Gordo said.

david.zahniser@latimes.com

maeve.reston@latimes.com