Crime Bill’s Defeat a Blow to Southland Cities : Budgets: Many state and local agencies were anticipating an infusion of hundreds of millions of dollars over the next six years.

In defeating President Clinton’s crime bill, Congress added another quick and painful thump to cash-strapped local governments, and officials said they were surprised and angered by the turn of events.

The legislation would have provided hundreds of millions of dollars--perhaps as much as several billion dollars--over the next six years to state and local governments seeking to stem the tide of crime.

“This is a slap in the face to everything we have tried to do to turn this city around,” Los Angeles Councilman Richard Alarcon said.

Mayor Richard Riordan, whose central campaign theme was boosting the number of officers on the streets, called the setback on the crime bill “a real blow to the people of Los Angeles.”

Although no one had factored crime bill money into their current budgets, many agencies were looking forward to an infusion of funds next year. Police, courts and jails would have been the primary beneficiaries of the bill’s myriad provisions and programs. But agencies as varied as the Los Angeles Unified School District, battered women’s shelters, sports leagues for at-risk youths, and Boys and Girls Clubs would also have received new funding under the bill’s crime prevention programs.

Los Angeles city officials said the crime bill could have brought as much as $100 million in federal funding to the city’s crime-fighting efforts.

The Los Angeles Police Department figured it was entitled to about $50 million from the bill to add hundreds of officers to the force, fund more overtime pay for officers and pay for new police equipment.

The city is embarked on an effort to add 2,855 police officers over the next five years, and Riordan said the crime bill’s defeat will not upset those plans. Riordan said Project Safety Los Angeles will proceed without the federal crime money, but “we’d sure like to have it.”

An additional $25 million would have been available to the city for drug treatment, education and jobs, officials said.

Other big losers include the state Department of Corrections.

Tip Kindel, a spokesman for the Department of Corrections, said that over the next six years California would have received about $1 billion to help pay for its prison construction program.

The measure also would have provided an additional $700 million over the next six years to house state prisoners who are illegal immigrants. Further, the bill would have authorized the hiring of 4,000 new Border Patrol agents over six years, some of whom would have been stationed along the California-Mexico border, said Paul Kranhold, a spokesman for Gov. Pete Wilson.

But some Washington watchers cautioned that much of the money that so many in California had been counting on may have been illusory from the start.

Mark Tajima, a federal legislation analyst with the Los Angeles County chief administrative office, said that authorizing $33.2 billion in crime funds is one thing. But getting Congress to allocate the money is quite another.

For instance, a law passed by Congress in 1986 authorized federal funds to help pay the cost of incarcerating illegal immigrants who committed felonies, an issue of tremendous import to California. But Congress has yet to appropriate funds for that program, Tajima said, and it is unclear what level of funding would ever have been available under the Clinton crime package.

And cumbersome rules and regulations may have kept many local agencies from ever receiving any funds, Tajima said.

One of the bill’s major provisions, the $8.9-billion community policing program, requires local agencies to match federal funds on a minimum 75% federal to 25% local split. Communities that are willing to increase their share of the cost above 25% would be first in line to receive the funds.

That could help the LAPD, which is in the process of expanding its ranks.

But cash-strapped agencies, such as the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, would probably get nothing from the program, county analysts said. When the Sheriff’s Department applied for a federal grant under a similar program last year, and asked that the matching funds requirement be waived, the request was turned down and the county received no money, Tajima said.

Conversely, because of Los Angeles’ large population of undocumented immigrants, it would have received a very large share of money for incarcerating foreign nationals, analysts said. Other localities with small populations of such offenders would probably not go to the bother of filling out all the paperwork.

Tajima and others also noted that even if the funds were appropriated, the federal government would have to write new regulations, field applications, review the requests and then disburse the funds. That process, at best, could run well into next summer.

In any case, local youth organizations said they were eager to compete for some of the federal money.

“You can’t just get tough on crime once it occurs . . . you have to prevent crime,” said Danny Hernandez, executive director of the Hollenbeck Youth Center and founder of the Inner City Games. “We felt that we were going to get some of that money because groups like ours are in the trenches every day.”

Times staff writers Mark Gladstone and Bill Stall contributed to this story.