Council Calls for Public Vote on Police Tax

After weeks of political scrimmaging inside City Hall over whether Los Angeles can afford Mayor Richard Riordan’s promised expansion of its police force, the City Council on Wednesday punted the question to the public, voting to push a public safety tax for the November ballot.

“We are asking the public, ‘Is this what you want? . . . And if you do, are you willing to help us pay for it?’ ” said Councilwoman Laura Chick, who heads the Public Safety Committee. “If so, great. And if not, we can’t deliver the same number of officers in the same timeline. It’s the public’s decision.”

Lawmakers have not yet determined the format, size or duration of the proposed tax, so city staffers said Wednesday that they have no idea how much it would cost individuals. Riordan vowed to oppose the tax.

In voting 10 to 5 to support the new revenue, the council veered from its action Tuesday to slow police recruitment. Instead, the city would hire 90 new officers each month until November, then adjust the pace based on the results of the tax vote. If the tax fails, lawmakers said, the city will abruptly slow down the pace of hiring, bringing on only 450 new officers next year, rather than the 710 Riordan proposed.

“Freedom is not free,” said Councilwoman Rita Walters, who said the city should immediately cut recruitment to 70 per month. “If you want a safe city, you have to pay for it.”

Los Angeles voters have rejected half a dozen police-related tax measures since 1981. Several garnered a majority of votes, but fell short of the two-thirds margin needed to impose new taxes.

This time, lawmakers are considering skirting the two-thirds requirement by proposing a special assessment, which needs a simple majority vote. Even though Gov. Pete Wilson vetoed a bill in October that would have allowed such assessments for police, city officials have not decided whether to go that route because they are unsure whether state law allows such assessments to be used for police services.

In any case, council members vowed Wednesday to campaign vigorously for the public safety tax, and called on Riordan to do the same.

But the mayor--who promised to add 3,000 more officers to the LAPD by 1997 or step aside--said Wednesday that he will oppose the new tax, reiterating his plan to veto any slowdown of police recruitment.

“Leadership is, when you’re elected, you’re expected to set goals that are needed for the city--such as safety--and then meet those goals, not throw them back to the voters,” the mayor told reporters at City Hall.

“That’s our job. They elected us to find ways to pay for it,” Riordan added, saying the police plan can be financed by cutting “a tremendous amount of fat” remaining in the city bureaucracy. “This is not the type of government where every time there’s a tough decision you wimp out and go back to the public to make the decision.”

The police tax debate came as the council unanimously passed a $4-billion spending plan for next year that increases the sanitation equipment charge, raises parking ticket fines and building permit fees and imposes new taxes on utilities in order to add money for fire services, park rangers, crossing guards and library books.

The budget returns for final approval Tuesday, then goes to the mayor, who has five days to veto any item. In addition to the police slowdown, Riordan said Wednesday that he may reject the reduction in street resurfacing funds.

The council then has five days to override any mayoral veto--requiring a minimum of 10 votes--before the budget is finalized June 20.

Voting against the police tax Wednesday were council members Hal Bernson, Nate Holden, Rudy Svorinich Jr., Joel Wachs and Walters. Walters originally backed the tax, but switched her vote because she wanted to retain Tuesday’s council action to slow down police recruitment to 70 per month right away.

“Sometimes, we don’t get the message of ‘three strikes and you’re out,’ ” Bernson said, referring to the voters’ repeated rejections of other police tax initiatives.

But most council members remain worried about how to pay those police officers.

Riordan’s proposal to hire 710 new officers next year would be partially financed by a three-year, $53-million grant unveiled last week by the Clinton administration. Cutting back to 450 new officers would mean turning down about $19.5 million of the grant. Once that federal money dries up, however, city officials estimate that Riordan’s public safety plan could cost about $190 million a year; the scaled-back version has a price tag of about $164 million.

The Police Department receives $1.2 billion of the city’s $2.3 billion in unrestricted revenues, or 51%, compared with 18% for fire services and 5% for other programs such as parks and trash pickup.

“In three years, it’s going to be 75% of the budget. Is that enough? Why don’t we just make it 90%?” Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg challenged her colleagues Wednesday. “Why don’t we just close everything else down and make the city about just police and fire? That’s hogwash, but that’s where we’re headed.”

Council members Richard Alatorre and Mike Feuer, who sponsored the tax proposal, emphasized fiscal responsibility.

“The easy thing for the council to have done from the outset would have been to buy into the mayor’s budget,” Feuer said. “There’s one major difference between this approach [and the mayor’s]. And that major difference is we’re being honest with the voters about what it takes to get it done.”

At the Police Department on Wednesday, officials welcomed the council’s interest in expanding the LAPD but declined to comment on the notion of a new tax until there are more specifics.

But some previous veterans of LAPD expansion efforts derided the council vote as an ill-advised attempt to pass the buck. One high-ranking LAPD official said a ballot measure would be doomed to failure, and a former chief accused the council of sidestepping its obligations.

“This is simply a cop-out by the council. They don’t want to be held accountable for saying no,” said Daryl F. Gates, who ran the LAPD from 1978 to 1992 and in 1981 tried unsuccessfully to win voters’ approval for a tax that would have paid to expand the department to 8,500 officers. Gates, who has previously criticized the current LAPD expansion as too much too quickly, said he was upset to see the council change course on trimming the rate of growth.

“We’re running on empty,” Gates said of the city leadership. “I’ve never seen such ineptness in my years.”

Riordan inherited a department of 7,600 officers when he came to City Hall in 1993. The LAPD now has about 8,900 in the force, including 600 in the Police Academy.

But the LAPD remains proportionally far smaller than other big-city forces. With fewer miles to patrol and just over twice the population, New York has 38,800 officers. Chicago, a city with slightly fewer residents than Los Angeles, has a police force of 13,250.

The LAPD’s smaller numbers reflect historical budgeting priorities and approaches to law enforcement. Although it recently has moved toward more community policing, the LAPD in the 1970s and 1980s emphasized quick response, relying mostly on officers in cars instead of foot beats or other programs that require a higher concentration of officers.

Despite politicians’ exhortations about the importance of public safety, and polls showing that it is residents’ top priority, voters have repeatedly refused to shell out extra cash to support LAPD. The exception came in 1989, with the passage of a $176-million bond measure that promised 32 new or expanded facilities; after its adoption, officials concluded that the money could only fund 10 projects.

Most recently, a $171-million bond measure to construct police facilities failed in 1995. Another bond for LAPD facilities is planned for a 1997 ballot, and some department officials worried Wednesday that the council’s proposed tax to support officers might take momentum away from the campaign for better facilities, which a consultant estimated could cost $400 million.

Several council members said they believe voters are more likely to tax themselves in exchange for more officers than for police bonds, which have been badly managed in the past.

Proposition 1, which would have funded 1,000 more officers, earned 59% support from voters in 1993 and an identical measure won 63% of the ballots the year before. Council members said they think they can push the tax over the 66.7% hurdle this time because there has been so much emphasis on the LAPD expansion over the last three years. They also promised to campaign hard for the tax, which few of them did previously.

Regardless of the specifics, Sherman Oaks attorney Richard Close--who led the campaign against the 1995 police bond--said Wednesday that he found the council action “very troublesome.”

“The first priority of local government is police protection. The city has a $4-billion budget. They should be allocating more funds from that budget rather than asking for new taxes,” Close said, adding that a property-based tax is unfair because it hits homeowners and businesses but not people who work in Los Angeles and live elsewhere.

Times staff writers Greg Krikorian and Jim Newton contributed to this story.