NEWS ANALYSIS : Team Effort Helps Mayor Craft Budget : Spending: Riordan’s plan could not have been put together without the help of voters, union leaders and department heads. So far, only the Fire Department is upset.

If Mayor Richard Riordan’s budget were a movie, the end credits would include the voters of Los Angeles, a couple of sharp-eyed bureaucrats and a mayoral finance team bent on hunting down inefficiencies.

These and other players--including union leaders and department heads--made it possible for the successful businessman-turned-mayor to craft a budget that adds police, funds new programs to make the city more livable and erases a $170-million deficit while giving tax breaks to encourage businesses.

They enabled Riordan to deliver to the City Council next Friday a proposed 1995-96 spending package that advances his 1993 election promises to improve public safety, stimulate the city’s economy, make City Hall more efficient and revitalize neighborhoods.

“I propose to continue the course begun last year, to build on the momentum and pick up the pace,” Riordan told the City Council on Friday in a half-hour address before launching a citywide campaign to sell his budget. The $3.89-billion document is 5% less than this year’s budget, which expires June 30.

Released Thursday, the mayor’s budget got generally positive reviews from the City Council, but, as Riordan predicted, drew the wrath of the Fire Department. The mayor, in making a case for his controversial plan to eliminate 57 staff assistants from the department and replace them with lower-paid civilians, called the assistants, who are trained firefighters, “chauffeurs.”

Reflecting Riordan’s top priority, the budget calls for a 6% spending increase--to $1.1 billion--for the Police Department, enough to send 1,000 recruits through the Police Academy, expand community-based policing, replace 500 vehicles and buy 120 additional ones. It also adds to money raised by a private support group for computers to reduce officers’ time-consuming paperwork.

Riordan said he remains confident that the city will receive enough funds from last year’s federal crime bill to pay for about half the new officers, but added that he could find room in the budget for the additional police if the federal monies fall through.

How did the Riordan budget-writers pull it off during a time of recession-induced declines in city revenues, and while facing a deficit estimated to be as high as $200 million?

He did it with a lot of help--not the least of which came from voters, who approved key City Charter changes less than two weeks ago. In passing two amendments changing how the city pays pension fund costs and how it purchases goods and services, voters saved the city $29.5 million.

One of the biggest budget windfalls was discovered months ago by Airport Commission President Ted Stein and Airports Department General Manager Jack Driscoll, whose careful scrutiny of financial records uncovered $58 million from a property sale that should have gone to city, not airport, coffers.

City Administrative Officer Keith Comrie, the city’s top budget official, credited a “whole new attitude” brought about by Riordan appointees to commissions overseeing the city’s so-called proprietary departments: airports, harbor and water and power.

In the past, Comrie said, these departments had been unwilling to contribute a share of their revenues to the city, which provides support services to the departments. But beginning last year, the departments have kicked in substantially. In the coming year, Riordan proposes to take $116 million from DWP, $25 million from the Harbor Department and $30 million from airports, on top of the $58-million windfall.

“The independent departments have been very cooperative and helpful. . . . We’ve never had that before,” Comrie said.

He added that the departments’ contributions made it possible for the city to “add the equivalent of 2,400 more police officers in just two years.”

Further, the budget reflects the work of the Riordan budget-writing team, headed by Deputy Mayor Mike Keeley, who last year began a top-to-bottom scrutiny of every city department and service.

With the help of management audits and a private firm that conducted an efficiency study, the Riordan staff worked with department heads to analyze city operations with an eye to greater efficiencies.

The resulting budget proposal identifies several areas in which “surplus” jobs can be eliminated and the savings shifted to other programs. Riordan wants to cut 1,200 positions mainly in Building and Safety, Engineering and the Fire Department. These would occur mainly through attrition and a “buyout” incentive program for employees who leave voluntarily.

As soon as the mayor spoke Friday, Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas sent out questionnaires to his mostly minority, low-income 8th District constituents, seeking their views on the priorities set by the city’s wealthy, white Republican mayor. Ridley-Thomas said he will use the survey results “to shape my positions during the upcoming budget deliberations” next month.

Riordan said he believes he will get “very good cooperation” from department heads and employee union leaders, who helped shape the budget proposals. “The unions have been very cooperative” and helpful because their officials “know what’s going on in the trenches,” Riordan said.

The exception, he noted, is the Fire Department.

Fire Chief Donald Manning is “strongly opposed” to Riordan’s plan to cut the staff assistants, said Battalion Chief Roger Gillis.

Gillis disputed the findings of a study--conducted for the mayor’s office--that claimed that the 57 staff assistants are essentially glorified clerks and chauffeurs. Instead, according to Gillis, these aides play a key role in protecting firefighters in emergency situations and keeping the department in compliance with occupational safety regulations.

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Fire departments in eight of the 10 biggest cities in the United State have such assistants, Gillis said. But the mayor’s staff used data comparing Los Angeles to 13 cities that included smaller municipalities such as El Paso, Tex., and Jacksonville, Fla., where only a handful of the departments use these assistants.

Ken Buzzell, president of United Firefighters of Los Angeles, the union representing rank-and-file fire personnel, said Riordan has “declared war on the Fire Department” by seeking these cutbacks.

The mayor’s office has targeted Manning’s agency for cutbacks because it believes the fire chief’s political position has been weakened by months of controversy regarding sexual harassment and racial bias in the department, Buzzell charged. “They think the chief is an easy mark now,” he said.