The implication in his budget proposal this week is that Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and his staff will share the city’s financial pain and also take the10 percent cut he demands of all city departments.
The mayor said he will take a 12 percent cut to his own paycheck. He richly deserves it, and maybe much more.
A 10 percent cut for the mayor and his merry staff is more than rank symbolism for two crucial reasons.
First, the mayor and his staff make more — much more — money than any other big city mayor and their staffs. The savings from a reduction in payroll in the Mayor’s Office is not inconsiderable, and it will do what Villaraigosa has said that he wants everyone in the city to do: Share the economic pain.
The second reason is the mayor and the City Council largely created the current economic pain by blithely fiddling while the city burned. A textbook example of this was a year ago when then-City Administrative Officer Karen Sisson claimed that the city’s then ballooning budget shortfall was “manageable.”
Who Were They Kidding?
Sisson and other city officials well knew that city spending was like a runaway train — a train stuffed with big salary increases for city officials and managers, out-of-control spending on construction projects and escalating workers’ comp and pension payouts.
And despite repeated and clear warnings that tax revenue could plunge when the housing boom slowed, the mayor and City Council had only a vague fallback plan to deal with the pending crash.
But then they really didn’t need to have a fallback plan. They had the best and most reliable piggy-bank in the world, city taxpayers.
They could simply do what they always have done to clean up their budget mess, and that’s hike taxes and fees. They did it first by imposing the trash collection hike.
Next was the phone tax expanded into the telecommunications tax.
But though these tax and fee hikes soaked the taxpayers, they didn’t permanently close the growing revenue gap. City officials saw them as simply more cash to squander and mismanage.
Meanwhile, the high-paid City Council and fellow elected officials received generous pay hikes that ensured they remained highly paid.
A Garbled Message
What kind of message of sacrifice and austerity did that send to the unions and city employees? The six City Council members who had the decency to say no to pay increases, and Councilman Dennis Zine who voluntarily imposed a 10 percent cut on himself, should be applauded. But not too hard. They’re still on the hook for years of waste, mismanagement and bad budget planning.
Now in a panic, city officials are talking about contingency plans, such as smaller pay increases, tighter audits on department spending and on construction projects, absolutely no pay hikes for city officials, and consolidation of city departments and services — all things that should have been done a long time ago.
City Controller Laura Chick has been the lone Jeremiah crying in the budget wilderness, pleading with city officials to rein in spending. Her pleas fell on deaf ears.
The city is suffering deep financial pain. The mayor is offering a bitter pill of pay cuts to help cure the pain that could have been avoided. He deserves to be the first to swallow that pill.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His weekly radio show, “The Hutchinson Report,” (can be heard in Los Angeles on KTYM 1460 AM, and nationally on blogtalkradio.com
