CALIFORNIA COMMENTARY : Digging a Hole, the Big Apple Way

Last week, on a 4-1 vote, the Board of Supervisors gave preliminary approval to a 1992-93 Los Angeles County budget that has been hailed by its supporters as “historic,” as a “consensus” proposal signifying a “victory for the people.”

I respectfully but firmly disagree. In an effort to avoid pain and sacrifice today, this $13-billion spending plan--negotiated in private meetings without the benefit of public scrutiny and debate--simply postpones the day of reckoning. And thanks to an unprecedented amount of deficit financing, this year’s so-called soft landing could become a crash landing when the bills come due in future years.

I cannot support it. Nor should the public accept it.

Quite simply, this county budget would use one-time-only and borrowed funds totaling $325 million to finance current programs. In future years, these funds would have to be repaid, leaving less money available for future program needs. It depends partly on highly speculative savings from an expensive early-retirement buyout program, and skirts a state constitutional provision that would seem to prohibit deficit spending without a two-thirds vote of the people.

And to repay this enormous obligation, the budget’s boosters are betting against all odds on an early economic recovery that no one predicts, and economic assistance that no one honestly expects.

Should these scenarios fail to materialize, our problems would only be compounded, forcing us next year to confront even greater potential layoffs and service cuts as we try to repay our debt.

We’ve seen other jurisdictions get into trouble like this before--when New York City borrowed itself into bankruptcy in the mid-1970s, and more recently when years of careless borrowing and spending drove the Los Angeles Unified School District into Draconian salary cuts to close this year’s $400-million funding gap.

By relying so heavily on deficit spending, Los Angeles County would be making exactly the same mistake.

That is why I have proposed an alternative budget strategy that would minimize layoffs, service reductions and, most important, deficit spending. It would accomplish this by doing away with the costly early-retirement program and adopting instead a combination of a hard hiring freeze and mandatory one-day-per-month work furlough for the entire county work force.

Taken together, this approach would downsize the county work force through normal attrition and save the county about $135 million annually as long as the furlough remains in effect. This stands in stark contrast to the early-retirement plan, which could cost the county more than $100 million, money paid out to employees who in many cases would be retiring soon anyway, and which must be paid back in future years at the expense of critical county programs such as sheriff’s patrols, fire protection and public-health services.

Such a furlough could be implemented immediately and lifted as soon as the economy recovers or the targeted work-force reductions are reached. This temporary sacrifice would be shared equally by all county employees and the public, without hopelessly mortgaging our future.

It’s never easy to impose service reductions or salary cuts, nor will it ever be politically popular. But in my judgment, if we avoid making tough decisions today, county employees and the public will suffer more tomorrow.