Put an End to the Budgetary Games : Mayor’s race: We could put 1,000 officers on patrol at a fraction of the cost of hiring new ones if we paid overtime.

My vision for Los Angeles is one I share with most residents. We want a city where you can walk the streets in safety, where communities are clean of graffiti and debris, where people get along and where taxes are not prohibitive.

Our city’s crime problem ranks as the No. 1 concern among most Los Angeles residents I have spoken to during my campaign. However, for the past decade, the mayor and the City Council have failed to give the crime problem top priority in the city’s budget. City Hall has failed to fully utilize police officers already on the payroll. We could put 900 to 1,000 experienced police officers on street patrol duty today--without raising taxes. Why the mayor and the City Council have failed to do so strikes at the heart of why I want to be mayor.

The way to return 900 to 1,000 officers to street patrol is to provide enough money in the LAPD overtime account to pay our officers for the millions of hours of overtime they are required to work each year.

Instead, the mayor and City Council provide enough money to pay only 15% to 20% of the overtime hours worked, and officers are required to take compensatory time off for the balance.

The Webster Commission found that because of this time-off policy, on any given day, around the time of the riots, no more than 350 officers--a shocking 4% of the 8,190 sworn officers in the LAPD--actually turned out for street patrol during their watch.

Paying the full tab for overtime would cost about half as much as recruiting and training the same number of rookies. Nevertheless, the mayor and City Council persist in promoting ballot measures to increase property taxes to hire more officers.

The City Hall spending pattern is to lavish finances on favored projects and programs for politically well-connected special interests and then cry poverty when funds grow short.

The fact is that we’re spending $3.8 billion this year alone. Could we find money for more police overtime without a tax increase or cutting basic services? Absolutely.

Where could we find the money? By cuts that have been politically impossible until now. For example, we could eliminate the Board of Public Works, ban multiyear union contracts, increase employee contributions to the generous city pension system and give voters a chance to stop public financing of political campaigns.

The single most important source of money for basic services is the Community Redevelopment Agency, which for years has used its enormous power to siphon off billions of property-tax dollars from the city, county and Board of Education under the guise of removing “blight.”

By law, redevelopment projects were to be temporary; once the blight was removed, the property was to go back on the tax rolls. But the CRA’s primary role has been to perpetuate itself. Billions of property-tax dollars that should go for basic city, county and school services instead are lavished on never-ending projects and for such items as sprinkling glitter on the streets of Hollywood.

It is vital to the future of Los Angeles that those in power in City Hall put an end to the budgetary games that have resulted in spending plans with misplaced priorities. As mayor, I can do just that and ensure a safer, more livable and more neighborly city for all of us. E Pluribus Unum.