School Board Makes More Cuts in Budget : Education: Members put off controversial reductions in some workers’ hours.

Slogging its way through what one member called “the ugly zone,” the Los Angeles Board of Education squeezed out another $23 million in budget cuts on Thursday while postponing the very toughest decisions for yet a few more days.

The board agreed to tap its workers compensation insurance fund, raise fees for groups using school facilities and take out loans to pay for three construction projects and school police cars. It also sliced into services including gardening, landscaping, custodial maintenance, public information and curriculum specialists in a variety of subjects.

But it delayed until Monday action on several other proposals, including one that would cut the work hours of large numbers of non-teaching employees, in effect forcing them to take 5% pay cuts.

Board member Rita Walters held out hope that she and Assemblywoman Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) can work out a plan over the weekend to help the district. Without specifying what she and Waters have in mind “because it’s not fleshed out yet,” Waters persuaded board members to agree to re-examine the nearly 1,000 job cuts made so far if she has something concrete to offer Monday.

Noting that the state--which provides roughly 75% of the district’s revenues--has troubles of its own in the form of a deficit estimated at $2 billion, most board members expressed skepticism that even the powerful Waters can help.

With $30 million to go in the board’s weeks-long effort to close by June 30 a $220-million hole in the next fiscal year’s budget, the options left are a series of painful proposals that would hit the schools harder and could cost even more jobs. At a time when enrollment in the Los Angeles Unified School District is growing by 15,000 pupils per year, the board must trim more than 5% from an annual spending package of more than $4 billion.

“People ask me where we are in the budget process, and I tell them we are in the ugly zone,” board member Warren Furutani lamented.

The proposal to cut the hours of vast numbers of employees who work 11 or 12 months of the year, from custodians and cafeteria workers to top administrators, is controversial and could trigger problems with labor contracts or district personnel rules. It would affect some workers already hit in earlier budget-cutting rounds and, if limited to employees who do not work at schools, would create a two-tier system for workers who perform the same job but at different locations.

“The rest of us are going to be financing the teachers’ raises out of our own paychecks,” one central office employee complained.

She was alluding to the 8% annual pay raises for three years that the board granted teachers last year to settle their strike. Most other employees then got the same raises, increasing the already high proportion of the district’s general fund budget--82% in 1989-90--that goes to salaries and benefits.

Once the board finishes this year’s cuts, it will need to turn its attention to long-term solutions of what has become a steadily worsening financial outlook.

“The primary cause of (the school district’s) financial crisis is embedded in the fact that annual costs--primarily salaries and fringe benefits--are rising at a rate in excess of revenues,” Leonard R. Fuller, a partner in the accounting firm of Coopers & Lybrand, said in a summary of a report commissioned to guide the district into calmer financial waters.