Blog: How Elected Leaders Use Us to Dig Out of a Financial Hole

The City Council approved a $7.2-million budget Monday for the next fiscal year that runs from July 1, 2012 to June 30, 2013. As you may have noticed over recent years, each year starts off with the city operating in a deficit mode, meaning they spend more than the City collects. And the result each year is that the City Council and mayor come up with ideas to continue operating despite the shortfall in funds. The whole exercise doesn’t so much help the city move ahead. Rather, it prevents the City from falling into a condition requiring a bankruptcy declaration.

The City has been slow to act, and the problems get worse because of the delays. The City’s elected officials can cut expenses by ending or reducing amounts spent on certain services, including employees’ salaries. Laying off employees or enacting furlough days also cuts some money.

That’s a really basic description of one side of the situation. The other side of the picture revolves around the collection of money, either by direct tax collection or through federal funding, which also comes from taxes. They City can also raise money by charging the public for whatever it can find that works.

Right now, the area for a quick bump in collection is raising the “fees” for parking tickets. Tickets issued on street cleaning days were going to be bumped up from $68 to $78, but a lot of complaints about the plan has resulted in rethinking that charge, not least because it was considered to unfairly impact people who live in densely populated areas where it’s not easy to move cars on street-cleaning days.

Available parking is being cut down anyway, adding another layer of frustration in the L.A. driving experience. That, you might have noticed, is really a form of relief given to many developers so that the requirement of two parking spaces provided for each residential unit is not applied.

The City likes big development, and each parking space costs a developer anywhere from $30,000 to $40,000. The City has a goal of having more dense housing in place of single-family homes. But such goals tend to exacerbate existing problems—and the parking issue is one of them.

I have very little faith in the Council’s ability to place people’s well being above other considerations—such as the desire to raise money at any cost. It’s a far different story when City layoffs are on the horizon, as necessary actions to be taken when managing the City budget. Both the City Council and the mayor are reluctant to cut jobs because of potential conflicts with labor unions, including the SEIU and the group of unions called the Coalition. Deals made with these groups in past years have been an obstacle to trimming the City’s fat.

Just the other day, unions accused Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa of disproportionately targeting female employees in his announcement of 231 layoffs—a figure that was reduced slightly in the wake of the outcry. The idea that our otherwise self-serving mayor would axe jobs based on gender is ridiculous, not least because that would be illegal.

Besides, public service jobs are essentially gender-neutral, with no preference for one sex over the other. Hiring on the basis of gender would itself be another violation of existing law. True, there are some jobs that exist in which gender may be a factor in hiring, but a certain need has to be demonstrated by referring to the nature of those jobs. (The term usually used for such jobs is “Bona Fide Occupational Qualification,” or BFOQ.)

But to return to the issue of the City’s need for generating some quick cash, parking meters were a partial answer. Just a few years ago, parking meter fees were tripled and quadrupled citywide. Where 25 cents for 15 minutes was the rate for high traffic areas such as Downtown, the rate jumped to $4 per hour. Local rates for meters were hiked from 25 cents per hour to a dollar an hour.

If that was not bad enough for motorists and the merchants who wanted to draw shoppers, hours of operation were extended from the usual 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. In some areas, even later hours were added. Eventually, some adjustments were made in response to complaints. But parking tickets again seems to be the goal for a bigger payday from parking. The city raised parking ticket fines more than a year ago and now is going to raise all fines by another $5. If you thought L.A. had some expensive fines for parking violations, you were right.

On Monday, Dennis Zine, the Council member and ex-motorcycle cop running for City Controller in 2013, discussed how the City gets all the money from Municipal code citations, but does not get all the money from state vehicle code citations. (Evidently, the City gets 18 percent less in fines related to vehicle code violations.) Zine’s conclusion was that the City should therefore try to maximize citations under the Municipal code. The Council is now in a money grabbing mode and will stay that way for a long time.

Your elected leaders look to the City residents and businesses as a convenient source of covering their years of mismanaging the city’s business affairs. What used to be part of the whole package for the taxes collected from you now are tuning into “a la carte” services, with separate charges tagged. That’s nothing but another way to extract money from you.

Former CM Greg Smith chastised the opponents of a fee hike a few years ago when trash collection fees were about to be tripled from approximately $11 a month to about $33 to $36 per month. Smith lectured about how residents had been getting “free” services for far too long and that it was only fair that they now had to pay for them.

Smith did not mention that the services should have continued as part of the regular “package” of city services. Instead, he compared L.A.’s trash collection fees with those of other cities. The big difference—again not mentioned—was that those cities relied on private trash collectors. Because those cities did not have their own trash collection services, they were unable to provide any package of services. 

It was another money grab, done at that time to enable the mayor to add an "achievement" to his resume by raising the number of sworn officers in the LAPD to the magical “10,000” number—which never happened anyhow because the trash money ended up being used for raises and to cover some pension obligations. 

So, the practice of delineating services as a City strategy for raising more money for its General Fund is one to watch out for. City mismanagement of money is a fairly basic reason why Los Angeles is in a fiscal crisis. Too frequently, elected officials try to turn the tables on us by trying to convince us how much better things will be—or by blaming residents' needs for why things are they way they are.

But if you listen to them long enough you might believe them. It’s important to remember that we never got “free” things from the city, such as trash collection, because the services were included among the services provided by the city in exchange for the tax money it had collected for decades. In the last 10 years this problem has changed away from having livable conditions to one where our city’s official put more of the burden onto the backs of the rest of us.

To conclude, there’s another device that the City has used for years to collect money through creative ways. This is the “DISTRICT” suffix used to create another category of a la carte collections. Thus, we have a Business district, a Water district, a Parking district, a Lighting district, and so on. Separate charges are made for conducting a function under the appropriately labeled district. So, whenever you hear “District” being mentioned, beware of more charges being levied. (Revenues from some districts may be justified, however, if those districts are new concepts.)

Trusting that the city will somehow be fair while you sit back and wait for that outcome is a bad choice. What can change the behavior of our City leaders? Maybe a good start is to try to become a city in which more than 20 percent of registered voters turn up for City elections. After all, consider that no more than 4,788 votes (58 percent of the registered voters who actually voted) put Tony Cardenas back into office in CD-6.