Riordan Budget OKd With Police Buildup Intact

In an acknowledgment of the city’s preoccupation with crime, the Los Angeles City Council on Thursday approved a budget that embraces Mayor Richard Riordan’s plan for expansion of the Police Department and increases programs to keep young people out of trouble.

The council made some changes to Riordan’s proposed 1994-95 budget but left intact the heart of the plan--the addition of 450 officers to the LAPD. The buildup is striking in that it comes with the city mired in its fourth year of recession. Previous police expansions were financed during the boom times of the 1980s.

Riordan found the $83 million for the expansion without raising taxes. He did it largely through an aggressive foray into the treasuries of the airport, harbor and water and power departments.

In three weeks of deliberations, no City Council member was willing to buck the pro-police groundswell.

But several advocated a broader attack on the conditions that lead to crime and violence. They spent much of the last week adding social, cultural and recreational programs that they said will be even more helpful than the police in keeping troubled youths off the street.

The larger reconstruction of the city bureaucracy that Riordan had proposed was relegated to the “needs more study” files at City Hall. Plans to unite eight departments and commissions under two super-agencies were postponed and a plan to eliminate the Board of Public Works was submitted to a blue ribbon committee for more study.

To the mayor’s deputies and supporters on the City Council, the mere discussion of the issues was confirmation that Riordan had prodded a hidebound bureaucracy to examine itself. But to other council members and city officials, the delays were evidence of poor preparation by the mayor’s staff or of proposals that were more symbolic than substantive.

The budget, as amended by the City Council, must be formally adopted next week. Riordan will then have five days to veto any changes he does not like and the council will have five days after that to override him, if it can muster a two-thirds vote.

After four long days deliberating the $4.3-billion spending plan, all sides agreed that the mayor’s position on a larger Police Department was largely unassailable.

“All you have to do is read the papers and the polls, and public safety is clearly an issue with everyone,” said Bill McCarley, Riordan’s chief of staff.

Even Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas, a frequent critic of Riordan, said that the hiring of more police will be the “one clear accomplishment” of the mayor’s budget.

To drive the message home, Riordan campaigned around the city for his budget in a way that Mayor Tom Bradley never did. He distributed pamphlets summarizing the plan to community groups all over the city. Several hundred postcards that the mayor provided were returned by residents to City Hall.

The LAPD expansion is known as Project Safety Los Angeles. Launched with the help of Police Chief Willie L. Williams last fall, the plan is designed to add nearly 3,000 officers over five years to push the LAPD from its current force of 7,700 officers to 10,455. It also suggests that the equivalent of hundreds more officers can be put on the streets by shifting officers from desk jobs to patrols and by increasing the pool of money to pay police for overtime and working on days off.

While the council embraced those ideas, Police Department officials struck a cautionary note on one aspect of the plan. They noted that they have no way of knowing if police officers will work holidays and days off.

Project Safety Los Angeles anticipates that so many officers will be coming in on their days off that the equivalent of 431 full-time officers will be put on the street in the fiscal year beginning July 1.

But police officials said the theory is untested and there may not be many takers for the extra duty because police are required to take overtime pay instead of compensatory time for extra hours worked. Most officers will probably be on the beat at least 10 extra days a year, because of reduced compensatory time--making them less likely to sign up to work holidays and days off, said Police Department financial experts.

Still, the Police Department said it will aggressively encourage officers to work extra days to increase their presence in the street.

“The only difference will be we would have the equivalent of 1,100 more officers in the street, instead of 1,500,” Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky said. “You can’t fault the mayor. The mayor produced the money for 1,500 more officers and if the Police Department can’t spend it for that, it will go for something else.”

Riordan’s budget also made road repairs a high priority, after a report from a blue ribbon business panel that poor maintenance would lead to higher reconstruction costs in the future. A total of 200 miles of streets will be resurfaced in the coming year, double the number this year.

Another budget provision doubled the modest expenditure for graffiti removal and provided seed money for a project to promote business and tourism in Los Angeles. Removal of a 2-year-old surcharge on business taxes of 7.5% was also proposed.

The City Council approved the road repairs, graffiti removal and promotional campaign, but it modified the last proposal with a tax cut of its own. The city lawmakers approved a removal of half the business surcharge and a reduction in the fees that residents pay for trash collection. For homeowners, that cut will be from $72 to $54 a year.

The mayor and council agreed that the business tax reduction is an incentive for economic growth, although council members said that residents deserved a tax break too.

The council and mayor also put libraries and parks into a special category, among the few services in the city that will not be cut under a continuation of the city’s 3-year-old hiring freeze.

But council members suggested that those departments should play even a larger role in improving public safety and the atmosphere of the city. The council reduced reserve accounts by more than $7 million to increase staffing at libraries and parks to levels of a year ago.

That means that 35 recreation centers will remain open 38 hours a week, instead of just 25 hours, and that libraries can maintain current services and even expand a program that teaches schoolchildren how to use libraries.

The council added funding for a basketball league for hard-core gang members, for a coordinator to handle domestic violence complaints and for a job mentoring program for teen-agers.

“We cannot just deliver one service, more police, as important as that is,” said Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg, who led the charge for much of the social service funding. “I think we need to deliver services that make life more livable in the city of Los Angeles.”

The money for most of the council’s amendments would come from reducing the $38-million reserve fund that Riordan had proposed to $26 million. The mayor’s office declined to say whether it would veto the additions.

While Riordan was praised by many for his inventiveness in wiping away a projected $200-million deficit and finding $83 million more for the police expansion, some council members cautioned that all of the budget’s assumptions may not pan out.

“This is a high-risk budget,” Councilman Marvin Braude said, “but we have decided it is worth the risk.”

Among the sources of money that may not materialize, some lawmakers predicted, are the $17 million that Riordan said he could get this year from a city employee pension fund. That reduction has not been approved by the pension board. The mayor also projected taking in $9 million more from a new private parking enforcement operation on the city’s Westside, but that program will not be running by the start of the fiscal year, as projected.

And, on Thursday, the council had a protracted discussion about the legality of using $25 million from the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency to pay expenses that had traditionally been paid from the city treasury. The council ultimately approved the transfer, as long as the city attorney says it is on solid legal ground.