Calm Down, Listen Carefully : Mayoral panel’s multiyear plan deserves a full and fair hearing

Los Angeles should greet the ambitious recommendations of a task force of local business leaders--to pay for more police and city services by adding managerial innovation and eliminating $1 billion in waste and inefficiency from city government--not with cynicism, petty partisanship or bureaucratic resistance but with an open mind and a willingness to work with Mayor Richard Riordan.

Sound idealistic? Yes, but what is the alternative? More taxes? Not politically likely and probably not economically desirable. Vastly reduced municipal services? Not politically feasible and not wise public policy. So, if you can’t reduce government services or raise taxes, what do you do?

Just what the panel appointed four months ago by Riordan did: work up a multiyear fiscal plan that is, in effect, a program for reinventing city government. The panel put forward proposals the mayor has pushed before: from leasing the airport and the harbor to privatizing city services such as trash collection. Riordan’s goal is to get more for less from the bureaucracy. The City Council’s job is to weigh that goal against the long-term effects and risks of the proposals.

The panel also proposed reconfiguring the city’s contribution to workers’ pension funds (often a nearly untouchable part of any city budget), speeding efforts to collect fees and fines and scouring for other efficiencies (lots of luck).

The seven-member panel--headed by investment banker Michael Tennenbaum--did exactly what it should have done: put a plan on the table. And not a plan from Mars, either. This one has elements similar to ones being tried in other cities. Our sense is that some of these proposals are doable and some are not--we doubt, for instance, whether LAX can, or should, be leased.

But the goal here is to finance more police and other city services and infrastructure repair without significantly raising taxes. So this plan is Riordan’s vision. The City Council is not expected to--nor should it--endorse all that the Tennenbaum panel has proposed. But the council must do more than criticize; it must provide alternatives when they are needed. This city needs fresh ideas that can work.