Cutting to the core

Cuts to ambulance service are on hold pending further study, but layoffs of child-care workers at city parks are moving forward. Library hours and service days are on the chopping block. DASH bus service may be cut back. City departments monitoring community tensions, advocating for the disabled and serving neighborhood councils are doomed. Some 4,000 employees are soon to be removed from the payroll.

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and the Los Angeles City Council have spent the last month and a half looking for ways to make ends meet during the current budget crisis by increasing collections, leasing assets, raising fees and seeking efficiencies. But most often, they have returned to slashing services that are seen as simply unaffordable in such a dire economic climate -- and perhaps were always inappropriate, in retrospect, for City Hall to perform, even in better times. This desperate season’s watchwords are “core services.” Refocus on core city functions, the mayor and City Council members tell each other, and let go of the extras. The rub, of course, is the inevitable disagreement over just which services ought to be considered extra and which are essential parts of the city’s “core.”

What should a city be, anyway? What should its government do, what doesn’t need to be done, and what should it leave to Sacramento or to county government? These questions are easily avoided when budgets are flush and departments and programs can be created, staffed and funded whenever the council or the mayor see a need unmet, a constituency unserved or a political opportunity not yet grabbed. The city of L.A. has been able to become whatever its coffers and its voters allowed it to be, with little incentive for efficiency or self-definition. Today’s financial conditions require a more disciplined approach.

Cities are optional. They are political creations established to protect and enhance their residents’ quality of life, as that amorphous term is continually redefined. They can provide any service imaginable or almost none, depending on their voters’ aspirations. In that way they are fundamentally different from states, whose place and power are addressed in the U.S. Constitution and whose duties to their citizens are nonnegotiable; or from counties, which are to a large degree the state’s administrative partners and subdivisions.

The state and the counties, for example, provide healthcare and welfare -- plus jails and prisons, roads and highways, and an array of other basic functions. They must do so, legally as well as morally.

But cities, while they must follow state mandates in planning and in fields such as environmental protection and housing, generally get to pick and choose where to fill in the gaps. Most, for example, opt to provide their own law enforcement, although they don’t have to; most leave public health to county government (Pasadena and Long Beach are notable exceptions). L.A. may be different from other cities in that its very existence and identity are wrapped up in its other “optional” projects, such as owning and operating a municipal utility, a harbor and an airport. In the end, though, it’s still a city, without the mandates assigned by law and society to counties and the state.

Understanding different missions of cities and states marks the starting point for any discussion about what Los Angeles City Hall must do and what it can do without. It would be perfectly consistent to decry Sacramento’s budget-slashing plans to reduce welfare-to-work, in-home healthcare for seniors and the disabled, foster care and similar human services programs -- because those are the state’s core functions -- while accepting the demise of city programs such as the Department on Disability and child care at city parks. The state and the county have more mandates than choices. The city has more choices than mandates.

Villaraigosa has named public safety and public works as the city’s core functions, and he is correct. He has been right to keep hiring police officers, even as he cuts nonessential departments, because a fully staffed and deployed LAPD is central to the city’s core mission.

But so are traffic officers, paramedics, firefighters, building inspectors, deputy city attorneys and all the drivers, dispatchers and office workers who support them. The need for parks and libraries may be less acute than the need for cops, but they too are essential to safe, livable neighborhoods.

Now add in public works: sanitation, tree trimming, lighting, bridge maintenance, engineering. And land use: planning, permitting, safety inspection, traffic control. It is impossible to ensure an acceptable quality of life without providing these functions.

That leaves little that can easily be categorized as “extra,” so in the end, it seems inevitable that both core services and more extraneous ones will be cut. Every cut will hurt, but at the very least, Los Angeles residents deserve to know which are which: Of all the cuts, which are intended to be temporary -- to be reversed in better times -- and which are to be considered permanent because they fall outside what the council and the mayor define as the city’s central mission.

There’s another key difference between the state and the city: bankruptcy. States are not eligible to file under Chapter 9 of the Bankruptcy Code, and that affects the performance of state officials and interest groups. Their budget battles go on so long and so often, in large part, because there is never really a reckoning. Knowing that no bankruptcy trustee will rewrite their labor contracts or zero out their pensions, state employee unions arguably have little incentive to encourage responsible budgeting.

But cities and counties can and do go bankrupt. Orange County notoriously went bankrupt in 1994 due to irresponsible investments, but Los Angeles County too moved to the brink at the same time. It was a wake-up call for the Board of Supervisors, whose members ever since have handled county finances as though they lived through the Depression.

The City Council is now receiving a similar wake-up call, and it may be no accident that those members who objected most strenuously to layoffs and service cuts arrived in City Hall after serving in the Legislature, and those who called earliest and loudest for drastic action had been longtime city employees before running for office. Both perspectives add something of value to the mix, but in the end, Los Angeles leaders must recognize that they operate with neither the state’s mandates nor its cushion.