No Money for Extra Police? But Budgets Grew and Grew

The Los Angeles City Council has approved a new budget that includes $7.5 million to add 250 officers to the police force. This is a move in the right direction. But, sadly, the council’s action does not reflect a fundamental change in the way the city addresses its budget priorities.

Only when there is a great public outcry, like the one for more police protection, does the budget begin to remotely reflect the priorities of the electorate. More often it reflects the priorities of the politicians at City Hall. Those with the most at stake--public employees and bureaucrats--have an institutional bias in favor of increasing salaries and defending their departments’ share of the budget.

Since 1983 the budget has increased by more than 30%, to more than $600 million. In the intervening period, inflation--as measured by the consumer price index for the Los Angeles-Long Beach metropolitan area--has increased only 12%, or an amount equal to $250 million. While only a rough indicator, the inflation figures suggest that in the current year we could have up to an additional $350 million to rethink the priorities of the city. These amounts do not include the substantial savings and revenue increases that could be generated through more efficient management of existing resources. For instance, in 1983 a special citizens’ committee saw more than $60 million in annual savings that could be generated from existing operations.

Yet what has been done with the $350 million? The vast majority of it has gone into pay increases for current city employees. Additional money has been spent in hiring 2,000 new employees, only 100 of whom were police officers. Salaries now constitute 77% of the departmental budgets, up from 71% only two years ago. What those figures mean is that pay increases are coming at the cost of capital projects, signifying a long-term deterioration in the city’s infrastructure. Moreover, the substantial payroll increases have not given the city any more services in the areas most in need.

Thus, while the private sector has been operating in an environment of austerity, givebacks and cutbacks, the city has enjoyed a sustained level of growth averaging almost 10% per year. And, rather than use those funds to address the critical needs of Los Angeles, the city government has used most of them for pay increases that simply perpetuate the interests and priorities of those in the government. Until the $7.5-million police-hiring reallocation, no reappraisal of needs in the city was conducted by the mayor or the council. This year’s budget is based on last year’s, which was based on that of the year before, and changes occur only on the margins.

Large institutional interests combine to force this outcome. Public employee unions see steep city revenue increases and want their “fair share.” Still smarting over the inflation of the 1970s, where real public employee wages dropped in comparison to the private sector, public employees argue that they now are merely catching up.

But the game has changed in the private sector. Public-sector wages now compare favorably to those in the private sector, especially in the blue-collar and clerical areas. An executive secretary in the city makes $35,000 a year, and has generous pension and fringe benefits not commonly found in the private sector. The risk of being fired or laid off in the public sector is small compared to the private. No city jobs have made their way to Taiwan lately.

It’s time for a serious reappraisal of the way we do business in the City of Los Angeles. For the past four years city revenues have far exceeded the cost of living. The majority of the money was spent responding to bureaucratic and labor pressures, and not to the needs of the city as a whole.

In the future the City Council needs to spend more time on the budget than just a cursory review of its provisions. Looking for $7.5 million here or there in a $2.5-billion budget in order to hire a few more police officers is not the way to address a fundamental lack of credibility that the city government enjoys with the citizenry. Councilman Hal Bernson has proposed, for instance, a fundamental change in policy. Under the proposal the city would simply take half the revenue increases in excess of the cost of living and allocate them to hiring additional police officers.

If such a proposal had been adopted four years ago we would today have an additional 1,500 police officers patrolling the streets with no tax increase and no cutback in other services. In comparison, the council’s proposal to add 250 police officers who won’t even be added to the force for about two years seems insignificant.

Still, even that modest proposal probably would have gone nowhere except for the controversy surrounding the call for a special police tax for South-Central Los Angeles and Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky’s desire to stake out issues distinguishing himself from Mayor Tom Bradley. By refusing to rubber-stamp the mayor’s budget, the council has begun the process of reordering priorities. If, however, it stops the process and follows its traditional route of making a few cosmetic changes here and there, the disaffection between the citizens and their government will grow. The last time the politicians got that out of touch with the citizens was in 1978, and the result was the passage of Proposition 13.