Mayor Vows to Veto Only 6 Budget Decisions

Saving his energy for the escalating fight over his Police Department expansion plan, Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan said Thursday that he intends to veto just six of the dozen major changes the City Council made to his budget for the coming fiscal year.

In addition to the promised blue-penciling of the council’s scale-backs of the police expansion and street-paving programs in the $4-billion budget, Riordan said he will alter four other council actions. Among them is his intention to restore $12 million the council deleted from the Police Department overtime account, money that he said is equivalent to 250 more officers on the streets.

“I’m sure the goals of the public safety plan are absolutely necessary” to the city’s future, Riordan told a meeting of Times editors and reporters. Riordan is gearing up to battle the council over his three-year-old public safety plan, which calls for adding 2,800 police officers to the department over four years.

The council initially approved the plan, but several members, including the chairs of the council’s public safety and budget committees, have said the city cannot afford such an ambitious expansion. Last week, the council voted 8 to 7 to reduce the number of additional officers to be hired in the upcoming budget year from 710 to 450, unless voters agree to a tax to help pay for the additional officers.

The mayor angrily accused the council of handing off the “tough decisions” to the voters, saying that it lacked the will to make organizational changes in the city bureaucracy and take other steps to find a way to pay for the expansion.

But some council members, including Mike Feuer, said it was the mayor who was passing the buck by committing to an increasingly expensive expansion without a clear means of paying for it down the road.

Riordan said his other three intended vetoes are “technical” shifts to bring the city’s reserve fund up to $31.2 million. They include deleting $3.2 million from the Fire Department overtime account, $1 million in alterations and improvement funds from the Department of General Services, and $800,000 from a special parking revenue account.

But the mayor will let stand other council decisions he doesn’t like, including the $30 million in airport revenues that the lawmakers deleted as too uncertain to be counted on in 1996-97 and the council’s restoration of funding for electrical test labs in the Department of Building and Safety.

Riordan said he believes that the council remains committed to finding ways to “legally divert” revenues from Los Angeles International Airport, a gambit that he has long counted on to pay for more police and other services without raising taxes, as he promised during his 1993 campaign.

As for the test labs, which the council kept by raising fees for builders and other clients, Riordan said that he will ensure that customers are told they can use private labs. If the city’s services do not prove to be competitive, the issue can be reconsidered next year, he said.

Riordan said he will announce his budget decisions at a news conference today but noted that he has until 5 p.m. Tuesday to formally tell the City Council of his actions.

The timing is important, because the council has five business days after he transmits his vetoes to try to override them. The mayor’s office wants to keep its options open as it plots strategy to avoid an override, especially of the Police Department expansion.

The council can override a mayoral veto with 10 votes, and both sides already are planning voting strategies and trying to get their messages out.

Complicating the mayor’s situation is the absence of Councilman Joel Wachs, one of the mayor’s seven votes on the police expansion issue. Riordan turned to Wachs when Councilman Richard Alatorre, chairman of the budget committee and normally Riordan’s strongest council ally, led the scale-back effort, saying he was unwilling to risk parks, libraries and other services if significant new revenues do not materialize over the next few years to pay for an expanded Police Department.

Others, including Councilwoman Laura Chick, head of the Public Safety Committee, raised concerns about the “hidden” costs of the added officers, including training, equipment and facilities.

The scale-back infuriated Riordan, who has made public safety, including the full expansion, his administration’s top priority.