County Braces for Grim Reality of Budget Cuts : Government: Only emergency services will be spared. Some suburbs have avoided wide-ranging cuts--for now.

It’s not “Blade Runner.” Then again, it’s not the stuff of tourist brochures either.

County hospitals so crowded that preventable deaths prove inevitable. Police and prosecutors stretched dangerously thin. Parks shut down and fenced like prisons. Libraries closed. Beaches without lifeguards. Welfare payments so low the nation’s homeless capital only finds more downtrodden on the streets.

As the dust settles on California’s new $52.1-billion budget, some or all of those urban horrors are more than just possible in Los Angeles County, government officials, employee unions and others say. They seem probable. So although the 1993-94 spending plan is good news for schools, it is bad news for cities and terrible news for counties that provide many services.

“I am absolutely saddened about what is happening to our community. It is tragic,” the county’s chief administrative officer, Harry L. Hufford, said of a looming $1.6-billion county debt that could force 9,500 layoffs and unprecedented cuts in everything but emergency services.

On Monday, the County Board of Supervisors begins three weeks of hearings and deliberations on its proposed $13.1-billion spending plan that spreads the pain of cutbacks over virtually every department.

The supervisors will hear from a parade of bureaucrats, union officials and homeowners, as well as the infirm, destitute and disabled who depend on county services. All will be making the case to spare their special interest, whether it be a sheriff’s substation, a neighborhood clinic, welfare caseworkers or Little Leagues at dozens of county parks.

“It is even more tragic that cuts like this will actually have to be implemented,” Hufford said, “that we will have to demonstrate with cruelty what we have tried to illustrate through testimony.”

Notwithstanding Hufford’s Angst, not every jurisdiction has been pummeled by the state’s decision to shift $2.6 billion from cities and counties to schools.

In Pasadena, for example, the City Council just approved a new budget that will cut 41 jobs but maintain most city services and even allow some libraries to reopen--thanks to a new tax passed by city voters.

Likewise, other municipalities expect to weather the latest budget shortfall without severe discomfort--Compton will temporarily put off hiring four firefighters, Whittier has reorganized its staff and cut 10 positions, and Redondo Beach will avoid major cuts by dipping into its redevelopment fund, leaving another dozen city jobs vacant and consolidating its pier and parks departments.

Still, the impact of the state budget will be felt far and wide in this region.

The city of Los Angeles will lose at least $24 million--an amount one official said will force a look at “substantial layoffs.”

In Manhattan Beach, the Manhattan Heights Library was forced to close its doors one year short of its 30th anniversary because the city could no longer afford to staff it.

The budget ax has even fallen in Beverly Hills. Officials say that to balance the 1993-94 spending plan they will need to lay off 25 to 30 employees, most of them from the management and professional ranks. The accounting and clerical ranks already were thinned.

Want some idea of how the state budget will affect the county’s far-reaching services?

Hufford suggests looking north to Alameda County, a much smaller but equally urban jurisdiction where lawmakers recently adopted a new budget calling for 700 layoffs, devastating cuts to libraries and health services, and the slashing of general relief payments for the poorest residents. Still possible: layoffs of 500 deputies and prosecutors.

Now consider that, Hufford said, and multiply it many times over for Los Angeles County--the nation’s largest, and the region’s biggest employer with 86,000 workers.

“That is what we are looking at,” Hufford said.

Although cities generally escaped the worst of the state budget fallout, they will in many cases find their own financial shortfalls compounded by the county’s woes. That’s because they depend on Los Angeles County for services and facilities ranging from libraries to parks.

Take Lakewood.

The nation’s first postwar planned community and the first to contract for most of its services with a county, Lakewood was once christened “Tomorrow’s City Today.”

Today, 44 years after its creation, “Tomorrow’s City” is struggling like so many others.

In the past three years, Lakewood’s work force has been trimmed 12%. One of the three county-run libraries in Lakewood closed last year and now the city faces either the closure of another library or a drastic cut in hours at both facilities. Park hours will be trimmed while parkway trees will not. And though the county’s basic public safety services will not be reduced, Lakewood spokesman Don Waldie said officials expect curtailment of other services such as gang suppression programs.

“We are going to scrape through this year but at a very high cost,” Waldie said.

“Residents will not look out their front doors and see Lakewood looking worse. They won’t go to a park and see it abandoned. They won’t come to City Hall and see services no longer provided.

“But this can’t go on forever,” Waldie said. “We can’t go on taking hits and keep the loss of services invisible.”

Nor, officials say, can other jurisdictions.

“Two years ago and even last year, the report was mixed on how cities would be affected,” said Don Benninghoven, executive director of the League of California Cities. “This year, it’s pretty much the same all over. . . . They (cities) are all going through the same sort of cuts the state was going through last year.”

And although the cuts for cities were not as deep as originally expected, the league’s Sherie Erlewine said that is little consolation for many municipalities.

“It’s difficult for us to be euphoric because cities already are hurting so badly from the recession,” she said. “I mean, cities already have lost (up to) 30% of their general funds just because of lost sales tax revenues, property devaluation and unemployment. So the cities have been making cuts in services, and frankly for the state to come along and say, ‘Well, we’re not sure the cities have been doing that much’ . . . has been pretty hard for them to take.”

In the past three years, Los Angeles’ work force has been cut by 3,000 positions, according to City Administrative Officer Keith Comrie. That translates, Comrie said, to a 20% drop in staffing for all but police, fire and sanitation departments. The budget cuts, coupled with the recession, have forced even the LAPD to reduce its work force 5% by freezing 560 positions.

But the real hit locally has come at the county level, where officials have already warned that the reduction in state funds could force Draconian cuts in services that will touch everyone: 5,000 layoffs and closure of dozens of medical facilities, 23 parks and 45 libraries.

County CAO Hufford said: “This (state budget) means more cuts in health, welfare, parks and beaches and other non-criminal justice services.

“I just think it is a form of terrorizing the county of Los Angeles.”

So do others.

“It’s almost beyond description,” said Dan Savage of Service Employees International Union, Local 660, which represents half the county’s 86,000 employees.

Noting that emergency room patients have an average 15-hour wait at the county’s six hospitals, Savage said the notion of further cuts is unthinkable.

For years, Savage said, budget cuts drew little notice from the public. “The feeling was, ‘So parks are not as nice, the grass is a little longer and bathrooms a little dirtier.’ ”

Now, he said, that may change. “Now we’re talking about things like not having lifeguards at beaches,” Savage said. “Last year, the lifeguards say they had something like 11,000 ocean rescues. So are we going to have 11,000 people drown this year?”

Even if such scenarios do not materialize, many officials worry that deep cuts in even non-emergency services can have dire consequences for the region.

“The inability to provide parks and recreation in highly compressed urban areas is a great risk,” Hufford said. “We have been in community meetings and you can see the tensions developing as we talk about park closures and cutting back libraries.

“There is anger in the suburbs, but there is even a greater degree of tension in urban areas,” Hufford said. There, he says, residents explain: “Libraries and parks are resources for our kids, they have no other places to go, it’s either that or the streets.”

Waldie of Lakewood said the state is not only cutting funds but is cutting back on cities’ options for bailing themselves out.

Twenty years ago, he said, many cities such as Lakewood--with limited revenue options--received a large return from Sacramento of the cigarette tax revenues collected in their towns. They received so much money, in fact, that it was then one of Lakewood’s top five revenue sources.

“Today, cities get zero. Nothing. Goose egg. Not one dime in cigarette (taxes),” he said.

A similar diversion of local court fines to Sacramento, he said, has left Lakewood, like many jurisdictions, with not enough in receipts to pay for traffic enforcement units. “It is reaching the point,” Waldie said, “where cities have to ask, ‘What is the value of traffic enforcement when we don’t get the money to pay for it?’ ”

As Waldie sees it, the reason local governments exist is being threatened.

“They provide law enforcement, the fire department and paramedics, the water, sanitation, street lights. They also provide the things that make life a little sweeter, like parks and libraries and services to people in need.

“Well, that civilizing capacity is being lost. Gradually we have less resources to provide the basic civilization services,” Waldie said.

“And one day, citizens are going to look up and realize that something good about living in California was lost because the cities will no longer have resources to provide that.”