California Elections : Bradley Claim of Fiscal Conservatism Takes Some Hits From Critics

In the opening words of a 30-second campaign commercial, an unseen actor reviews the fiscal record of the longest-serving mayor in the history of Los Angeles and in a voice rapt with conviction praises his stewardship.

“Tom Bradley’s done what no big city mayor or California governor’s ever done. Bradley’s balanced the budget for 13 straight years,” the announcer intones before going on to cite the mayor’s role in luring the 1984 Summer Olympic Games without spending tax dollars and establishing an anti-drug program for children and a toxic strike force for polluters.

The television spot, promoting the Bradley gubernatorial candidacy, portrays a fiscal conservative who has kept the nation’s second largest city financially sound and running smoothly during his four terms as mayor. Over that period, his supporters say, Bradley guided Los Angeles through some tough economic times with little disruption to city residents and minimal pain to their pocketbooks.

That image, however, is disputed by Republican Gov. George Deukmejian--Bradley’s opponent in November--who tells voters that the mayor is a liberal Democrat masquerading as a fiscal conservative. Derisively referring to Bradley as “Tax Hike Tom,” Deukmejian accuses the mayor of saddling Los Angeles residents with four tax increases--a contention that Bradley calls “a deliberate deception and distortion.”

Deukmejian and his supporters also scoff at the mayor’s boast of 13 straight balanced budgets and contend that Bradley has merely ordered higher taxes to maintain that balancing act.

Although the fiscal debate is overshadowed by more publicized issues in the gubernatorial race, Bradley’s record as a fiscal manager has been touted by the mayor and ridiculed by his opponent as an accurate indication of what kind of job Bradley would do in Sacramento.

To his supporters, Tom Bradley is a mayor whose intimate knowledge of the city budget and low-key administrative skills have steered Los Angeles through economic downturns and through the financial uncertainty of the post-Proposition 13 era. He oversees a municipality with the highest bond ratings and a financially healthy airport and harbor, they argue.

Called Overly Cautious

To critics in city government, Bradley has been an overly cautious mayor whose attention to minutiae and nonconfrontational style have kept him from exerting effective leadership. They contend that he often shows a lack of control over city departments and is slow to respond to crises. They cite as an example the deterioration of the city sewer system and delays in repairs that will cost residents in skyrocketing sewer service charges.

According to a 1984 study for the Los Angeles Taxpayers Assn., Los Angeles has the second highest utility users’ tax in the state, is tied for the highest hotel-motel bed tax and has a business tax per capita that is three times higher than the county average.

And even as Bradley points to an efficient administration, some members of a blue-ribbon committee he appointed in 1983 claim that their panel identified ways to save tens of millions of dollars through possible budget cuts and streamlined operations--many of which were ignored by the mayor and City Council.

Bradley himself dismisses most of that criticism, but he bristles at Deukmejian’s suggestions--made at recent campaign stops--that the mayor’s record is one of swollen budgets and tax increases.

‘Absolutely Untrue’

“All you have to do is look at the record and see that that is absolutely untrue,” Bradley told The Times. “I don’t know if the governor has the wisdom to know that, but I have to assume that he has budget experts who can look at figures and know that that’s not true.”

What kind of fiscal manager has Tom Bradley been for Los Angeles?

The picture that emerges--from interviews and an examination of budget documents covering Bradley’s four terms and 13 years in office--is that of a mayor steeped in the complexities of the municipal budget who is at home with the small details and mundane demands of local government.

He is a chief executive who grills his department heads privately about their budget requests yet has clashed openly with several police chiefs over their budgets and policies. Bradley once joined forces with business in persuading the City Council, and then the voters, to approve limits on police and firefighter pensions that were consuming an increasing share of a strapped city budget.

His reputation as a fiscal conservative also may have been forged as much by circumstance as by his own philosophy.

‘Pretty Lean Years’

“The years I was there, when Bradley was mayor, were pretty lean years,” said former City Administrative Officer C. Erwin Piper, who served for six years as Bradley’s chief budget officer. “No mayor, I don’t care who it may have been, could have been a financial liberal during that period.”

Piper, who was the chief administrative officer when Bradley took office in 1973, said the former policeman and ex-council member was left with little room to implement any new city programs or maneuver as mayor during his first years in office. A tight budget, an oil crisis, a sputtering economy and the passage of Proposition 13--the sweeping property tax-relief measure approved by state voters in 1978--saw to that.

“Bradley quickly gained a reputation as being a fiscal conservative,” Piper said, “and that you have to say he was. He had to be. He had no choice.”

When Bradley succeeded Sam Yorty in 1973, he inherited a municipal government with a $695.8 million budget that included $1.2 million to run the mayor’s office. There were 2.76 million city residents and 30,900 city employees to serve them.

This year, the mayor and City Council approved a budget of $2.3 billion. The line item for the mayor’s office, including salaries, expenses and equipment, has soared to $3.24 million, and after a loss of federally funded positions and employee cuts, there are now 28,800 city employees to serve the needs of 3.2 million city residents.

Politicized Process

Perhaps the most important measure of a mayor’s priorities and financial goals is the annual budget the mayor must submit to the City Council each April. In a highly politicized process, the budget document is first proposed by the mayor, then reshaped by the council and finally adopted in a compromise.

In nearly all of his budget messages, Bradley has named public safety and emergency services among his priorities, and allocations to those departments have comprised a major chunk of his budgets. The Deukmejian campaign says the actual line item for police--as a percentage of the total budget--has actually declined from 23% in 1973 to 17% in 1986. But city budget officials say that measurement is bogus because, over the years, some police duties have been shifted to other departments as the overall budget has become much larger.

In all, Bradley has put together 13 budgets and boasts of never having submitted an unbalanced one to the council, as his predecessor had done, leaving council members the prickly task of finding revenue sources to make up the deficit.

The budget-balancing claim has become a familiar refrain of the Bradley campaign, although his critics point out that the state Constitution requires local governments to operate without a deficit, and Senior Assistant City Atty. George Buchanan also pointed out that the City Charter calls for the mayor to submit a balanced budget.

‘Politician’s Way’

“You have to balance the budgets,” agreed Piper, the former chief administrative officer. “(Bradley’s) claim is that he has broken down the budget and reduced the expenditures in the budget to be within the estimated revenues. And of that, he can take any credit he wants. Putting it the other way around, it’s a politician’s way of saying things, I guess.”

To some, however, the real test of balancing a city budget is whether it requires a tax increase to accomplish that task. And just how often Bradley has done that has become a campaign issue.

Deukmejian has been telling California voters that Bradley raised the taxes of Los Angeles residents four times during his 13 years in office--and that he proposed a fifth tax hike that was eclipsed by an unexpected surge in revenues.

Bradley and city budget officials, in turn, contend that the mayor actually raised taxes only twice--in 1975 and 1983.

Several of those disputed taxes came during the years leading up to Proposition 13 when property tax revenue was used by cities, counties and special districts as a stopgap source. Before implementation of that ballot initiative, local governments themselves raised property taxes according to the needs of their budgets.

Tax Rate Limit Fixed

For example, in Los Angeles, after projecting the revenue from other taxes, city officials set the property tax rate--up to a maximum of $1.25 per $100 of assessed valuation--to arrive at the amount needed to balance the budget.

Of that amount, 26 cents was locked in by law for recreation, parks and libraries. The rest of the tax could vary, as long as it did not exceed 99 cents, and it was in this discretionary area of the tax rate that levies could be lowered or raised.

But, Piper said, “the increase in the property tax during those years was not an item over which the mayor had much control.”

According to the City Charter, employee pension and retirement funds must be maintained at certain levels, and if the money is not available elsewhere, taxes must be levied to make up the shortfall. In some cases, the mayor and council could transfer money from the general fund to meet those needs, but that might require sharp cuts in other city programs and fuel political controversy. So in most cases, in both the Bradley years and before, the mayor and council often turned to the adjustable property tax.

In the 1974-75 budget, the property tax rate was raised by 5.6 cents per $100 of assessed valuation to cover the “uncontrollable costs” of employee pensions, retirement and bonded indebtedness--a tax increase that Deukmejian maintains was Bradley’s responsibility but that the mayor says was unavoidable.

Rate Jumps 26 Cents

The following year, the city property tax rate jumped 26 cents per $100 assessed valuation in a tax hike Bradley had proposed. Six cents of that came after Los Angeles voters approved a fire tax override authorizing a $47.5-million program to improve Fire Department facilities and paramedic services. Seventeen cents were used to cover uncontrollable costs and 5.5 cents went to controllable costs, according to the chief administrative officer.

In his budget message that year, Bradley blamed “the problems which beset our national economy--stagnation and inflation” for straining city government and forcing him to raise taxes, as well as cut spending requests by $67.2 million, to balance his budget.

The next year, Bradley recommended another tax hike but an increase in the assessed value provided enough revenues to enable city officials to abandon that proposal.

Although Deukmejian blames Bradley for still another property tax increase in the 1977-78 budget, that 10-cent increase per $100 assessed valuation was due entirely to voter approval of a tax override to help pay for a $40-million fund for emergency police communications, city budget officials said. Bradley had backed that ballot measure.

The confusion over the tax increases--and just how much of a role Bradley played in them--was evident in March, 1983, when the Los Angeles Taxpayers Assn., a fiscal watchdog group representing 200 local businesses, gave an award to Bradley for not raising taxes for nine straight years.

Announces Increase

Only a month later, Bradley was making an unprecedented radio and television address to announce plans for a 15.4% property tax increase to offset a recession-fueled $142-million budget deficit.

As it turned out, that plan was scuttled when Bradley was surprised to learn that the city might owe $400 million in property tax revenue to Los Angeles County if it enacted its own property tax proposal.

Instead, the mayor and council members settled on raising the utility users tax, increasing the business license tax, adding revenue from trash collection fees and boosting the “transient occupancy” or hotel-motel bed taxes to make up the budget deficit.

For the average city household, it meant another $68 a year to help pay for filling potholes, replacing garbage trucks, paying bureaucrats’ salaries and buying new squad cars for the Police Department.

Bradley embraced the tax plan. “I signed it, yes, because there wasn’t any choice. We had to have that money,” he said recently.

Generate Revenues

According to the city clerk’s office, revenues generated by those taxes include $57.6 million from local businesses; $25.8 million from hotel and motel guests, and $391.1 million from utility users since the tax was imposed.

Those taxes have been renewed each year by the council with Bradley’s support. The mayor said that the extra dollars are still needed to help pay for city programs that have suffered through the lean budget years, including such unglamorous essentials as street paving and tree trimming. Critics say that it was deceptive to call such taxes temporary and that they should be lifted.

“These are not temporary,” said Paul Shay, a former executive vice president for the Los Angeles Taxpayers Assn. “Who are they trying to fool or impress?”

Others believe that much of the additional revenue may not have been necessary in the first place.

Dan Shapiro, a Democrat and candidate for city controller last year, had co-chaired the mayor’s Select Committee on City Finances and Budget appointed by Bradley in 1983 to find ways to trim city expenses and help offset the budget deficit.

Identify Possible Cuts

When he ran for office, Shapiro said his panel had identified about $50 million in possible budget cuts that could be achieved by using the city’s work force more efficiently, paring some programs, increasing fees and revising city purchasing methods to take better advantage of bargains. Some of those recommendations were implemented but most of them were ignored by the mayor and the City Council, Shapiro contended during his campaign in the controller race, in which Bradley backed his opponent. Jay Curtis, another committee member and a former president of the Los Angeles Taxpayers Assn., agreed with Shapiro. And he placed most of the responsibility on Bradley.

“The lesson I think I learned was that he basically stays a little too aloof from both the general management of the nuts and bolts of running the city and a little aloof on the leadership in trying to make, what I think, are fiscal reforms,” Curtis said.

Zev Yaroslavsky, chairman of the council’s Finance and Revenue Committee, had lofty praise for Bradley as a fiscal manager but said the mayor has a “laissez-faire” approach to overseeing city departments.

“That’s a good style. What you’ve got to be able to do, however, is that when the managers don’t manage, you’ve got to move in for the kill, and that’s what he hasn’t done,” said Yaroslavsky, who cited problems in the Planning, Cultural Affairs and Transportation departments.