Crunch time for L.A.’s budget

The City Council’s foot-dragging last week on the city’s budget crisis, and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s directions to staff to act quickly on job cuts, were both less than they appeared. More is required, and quickly, from city leaders.

Los Angeles must come up with more than $200 million in spending cuts or additional revenue between now and June 30 if the city is to remain solvent. The city’s top budget officer, Miguel Santana, proposed job and program cuts, but the council, instead of adopting them or any comparable alternative package, took even more money off the table and actually increased the size of the shortfall by several million dollars. Any further action, the council determined, would come only after an additional 30 days of almost daily meetings and discussions.

An optimist could look at the council’s action and conclude that its members are doing what they have to do. They began the necessary City Hall mechanics of job cuts, although without identifying which jobs are to be lost, and began working through the denial that always seems to afflict them when they’re faced with a new budget crisis. In the weeks ahead, they will talk with labor leaders, who somehow seem to have better management solutions than the managers do, and may come up with a few ways to cut expenses and make city government function more efficiently.

But there is little room left for optimism. Council members should have dealt long ago with their denial, anger, depression and whatever else they have to grapple with in order to recognize that the city has a serious structural deficit, and that now there is a steep recession, diminished revenue and fiscal ruin crouching at the door.

So it was a relief when Villaraigosa unequivocally ordered his department chiefs to cut 1,000 jobs. In the end, the mayor’s action may pare the payroll no more quickly than the council would have, but his order removes any doubt that it will happen.

But the mayor has neither endorsed Santana’s proposals nor offered an alternative. He must do one or the other, because whatever cuts the city makes to resolve the immediate budget problem must conform with a rational blueprint for the future. Otherwise, how does Villaraigosa choose which jobs to cut? He’s halfway there, having made clear that he places the highest priority on public safety and that he will not allow the ranks of the Police Department to be depleted. But the people of Los Angeles need and deserve the rest of the plan.

It might make sense to adopt Santana’s proposal to eliminate the Environmental Affairs Department, for example, despite the relatively paltry savings to the general fund, if it’s part of a strategic plan laying out how, and with what programs and funds, the city will address environmental issues in the future. The same is true of human services, cultural affairs and every other function the city performs. The city needs Villaraigosa to present a plan that details his vision, and it cannot afford to wait until mid-April, when the mayor is to unveil his spending plan for the coming fiscal year, assuming Los Angeles survives the current one.