Results tagged “budget crisis” from Ron Kaye L.A.

It took only seven weeks for the LA city budget to blow up.

 

Imagine that: Thousands of six-figure workers with huge lifetime pensions and health benefits, the nation's highest paid municipal elected officials with huge staffs and lucrative perks, and the $4 billion budget they put into effect 49 days ago is no longer valid.

 

And it only gets worse.

 

Revenue projections are turning out to be overly optimistic, as everyone knew when the budget was written The plan to lease parking lots for 50 years is running at least six months late and proving to be a lot less certain than, as everyone knew when the budget was written. Hopes for some sort of Wall Street miracle that would fatten the pension funds and reduce the city's liability are turning out to be pipedreams, as everyone knew when the budget was written.

 

City Hall is sinking into the quicksand of financial mismanagement, chasing declining revenue numbers downhill toward bankruptcy, making matters worse with almost every decision they make - and all the tough decisions they don't have the courage to make.

 

City Administrative Officer Miguel Santana sounded the alarm Tuesday, warning that failure to move quickly on the parking lot deal will lead to up to 1,000 layoffs immediately, force other drastic cost-cutting measures and "lose the option of securitizing parking meter revenue at a future date.

cao-parking-budget08-17.pdf

 

"If we don't have the money this year, we are going to have to take extraordinary steps to make it up," Santana told Rick Orlov of the Daily News.

 

"We would begin the (layoff) process immediately. Any money beyond that will be used to mitigate next year's shortfall, which is at $320 million. If we decide not to go ahead, then we should begin to make the cuts now."

 

He proposes making departments savaged of their senior staff by the costly Early Retirement Incentive Program pay the city's $21.2 million bill - police, fire, planning, City Attorney, transportation and so on.

 

Then, he wants library and parks volunteer programs gutted and $2 million or more from parks, fire and public works programs as well along with increasing the number of furlough days for thousands of city employees from two to three days a month.

 

Almost all these cuts impact the services provided to the tax-paying public which routinely is expected to pay the full cost of most services they do get from trash collection to ambulances.

 

If there is a method to this madness, it is to force the unions to the bargaining table to make concessions.

 

But what would motivate the unions to do that after City Hall has betrayed one deal after another and still doesn't have a plan to actually solve the financial problem?

 

They are running city government as if it were a business that can get rid of the services to the public - those that cost money but making a city livable -- while preserving revenue-generating positions as if turning a profit is the goal.

 

The mission ought to be to create a great city with great core services - not a social welfare system for wealthy and influential developers and corporations.

 

They are drowning in the muck of their failure of leadership and taking us all with them.

Think about this: All the City Council wants to do with the fantasized $53 million from leasing parking structures is to keep the endangered employees on the payroll for nine more months.

They don't have a plan to solve the problem. They face a $320 million deficit next year and a $1 billion deficit the year after.

What will be left when they are done?

Happy Bastille Day, Vive La Revolucion!

Two years ago today nearly 300 people from all over the city gathered on the City Hall lawn to stage a rally for better government and launch the Saving LA Project.

Our goal was to become an informal umbrella organization that would bring organizations and people together to challenge city policies and create a grassroots movement that could become a political force for reform.

We helped organize opposition to the solar energy fraud called Measure B, worked for the election of Carmen Trutanich for City Attorney and Paul Krekorian as Councilman from the Second District.

In some way we fell short of my expectations, in great part because of my limitations as an organizer and leader. But dozens of us have kept at it month after month, keeping up our efforts to show as many people as we could that the local issues that preoccupy them are part of a larger fabric of failure at City Hall.

This Saturday, a new movement SLAP helped spawn, LA CLEAN SWEEP (lacleansweep.com) will launch with a party at 1 p.m. at the Mayflower Club in North Hollywood. You can see the event flyer (CleanSweepLaunchFlyer.pdf), read our press release (CLEANSWEEPPressRelease.pdf) and information sheet for the media (LA CLEAN SWEEP INFO.pdf) or learn more by going to lacleansweep.com.

I hope you'll pass this information on to others because it's going to take the whole community working together to change the course of the city.

Clean Sweep is a political action committee that will work citywide to support a slate of candidates in the seven even-numbered Council seats up for election next March.

We need people regardless of ideology who are honest and open and have integrity and a commitment to serve the public interest, not the special interests. We need to end the sweetheart contracts and back room deals, the waste, inefficiency and bad management.

The principles of Clean Sweep and a draft platform were developed in a series of Sunday meetings by about 50 activists who met every other Sunday in the back room at Denny's Restaurant in Glassell Park.

HERE"S WHAT WE STAND FOR, OUR CORE PRINCIPLES
1. Financial Responsibility
2. Safe Communities with Modern
Infrastructure
3. Proper planning for the future
4. Open and Honest Government
with Integrity

If any sitting Council members can demonstrate a record of true public service and respect for all segments of the community and a commitment to power sharing, we will gladly consider them for our slate.

If not, they are on notice that they will face fierce challenges from credible candidates who can raise enough money to be fully competitive.

We must hold the people responsible who have raised our rates, fees and taxes even as they created the worst fiscal crisis in the city's history, even as they have made the situation far worse first by their failure to act in a timely manner and more recently by their failure to actually solve the crisis.

They are slashing our public services, closing libraries two days a week starting Monday, gutting parks programs, and all but eliminating effective planning and building code enforcement to protect our neighborhoods.

They are selling valuable assets, borrowing against the future, deferring costs in what will have a snowballing effect on the crisis with a $300 million deficit looming next year and a $1 billion deficit the year after.

It will only get worse unless we elect better people into office, people committed to a vision of a greater Los Angeles.

It will take the participation of thousands of concerned citizens to turn LA around with their hard work and their passion. It can be done.

LA has too much going for it to become a failed city like Cleveland or Detroit. But our infrastructure is old, our poverty rate soaring, our hopes for the future diminishing. It doesn't have to be this way.

We need new leaders that will bring us together and work for the common good.

This is our city. We need to take power; they will never give it away.

This is what we've come to: Four million people provide an average of $1,700 each to City Hall for police, fire, paved streets and sidewalks, parks and libraries and other basic services but all they care about is dogs, cats and gang-bangers.

Welcome to the City Hall Follies -- a burlesque that lasted 11 hours on Monday and amounted to petty bickering and maneuvering to add another $5 in fines for illegal parking so they can provide more jobs to hoodlums and keep a closed-to-the-public warehouse with 167 unwanted pets functioning.

Once again, the City Council signed off on a budget that carries out the mayor's plan for destroying the quality of life for the many to protect the few.

Even the word budget is inappropriate since it's largely a work of fiction: Unrealistic revenue projections, revenue that doesn't exist, layoffs and spending cuts they have no intention of carrying out.

Why they even go through the charade of holding a meeting in public and boring themselves and us to death is beyond me since it was always a done deal and solves nothing.

They balanced the budget on paper, not in reality. They want us to approve a tax on billboards so they can approve even more of them and legitimize the thousands of illegal ones they have done nothing about for years.

They make a mockery of government and fools of us.

It took them most of the day to come up the $5 illegal parking fine increase so they could keep the Northeast Valley animal shelter staffed to look after stray cats and dogs. It is the newest and costliest shelter in the city but never has opened to the public, nothing but a depot for animals destined to be euthanized.

A third of the dogs in the city are unlicensed so they impose a 50 percent fee on those who do license their dogs and do little or nothing to penalize those who don't.

They spend millions to keep gang members from killing each other and the occasional bystander and plan to spend far more to train them as "green doctors" and laborers so they can put them on the DWP payroll and justify more rate hikes.

But the people who obey the laws and pay the taxes see their libraries and parks closing and  the 75-year backlog in paving streets and sidewalks heading toward the century mark.

Like bums cadging for money on Skid Row, they beg the city unions that elected them to temporarily give back a little from the years of sweetheart contracts just so they can get through another few months without layoffs or furloughs.

They put themselves in this position by cutting a deal last year to bribe 2,400 workers to retire early and signed a contract that deferred wage increases with the promise that workers would get two years' of wage hikes totaling nearly 6 percent in 2010-11 if even a single worker was terminated or furloughed.

The bills are coming due for those wage hikes just as they are for the wage hikes they gave DWP workers at the same time, just as they will for their plans to borrow heavily to get through the next 12 months.

They are digging a financial hole for the city so deep that the day of reckoning accounts will have disastrous consequences.

At the end of the day, they all voted for this budget except Alarcon who objected that they didn't do enough for the poor, the unions and the special interests and Koretz who simply disappeared when the vote was taken to no one's surprise.

The instinct of many is to break up the city, slash their pay in half, declare bankruptcy or refuse to pay your DWP bill like so many others are doing with impunity.

We have come to this. We have become a global symbol of America's failure and fading glory.

My only answer, for what it's worth, is to throw these people out and start again with new leaders and a new vision that will treat people equally, restore trust in City Hall and offer a new deal that provides for a healthier future for LA   Otherwise it's time to sell off what you can and pack your bags like so many families and businesses already have done.

They call it their "gold in the gutter" -- the pennies, dollars and millions the City Council is using to paper over the massive budget deficits they created without actually reducing spending.

As the Council gets closure on its latest edition of phony budget-writing today, or perhaps Tuesday, the biggest nugget they are counting on is the $53 million in a lump sum payment from leasing 10 city-owned parking structures to a private company for 50 years.

That's a lot less than the upwards of $150 million the mayor was looking for a year ago but you can be sure that the mayor's and council's vast army of P.R. spinners will put a smiley face on this back room deal that will make someone very rich even richer.

To maximize revenue, the 10 parking lots are being put up for lease as a package with the revenue earmarked for the general fund to avoid layoffs -- and there in lies the problem.

The Department of Recreation and Parks like libraries and other services provided to the general public is under assault from city officials whose only goal is to protect city jobs, not public services. They already have eliminated 4,000 jobs that provide basic services through early retirement, vacant job eliminations and transfers to special funds and they want to avoid actual layoffs anyway they can.

But that isn't proving so easy to do.

Under the City Charter, the Pershing Square lot is owned by Rec and Parks which gets all the profits from it -- roughly $2 million a year now despite the city's utterly poor management of parking facilities and its high costs for salaries and benefits which are estimated at 50 percent higher than a private operator's, according to a consultant's report.

Back in January, the City Administrative Office and Chief Legislative Analyst offered a detailed analysis of the parking structure proposal, including this passage on the Pershing Square issue:

Pershing Square

RAP states that Pershing Square generates approximately $2 million annually that is used to
support RAP programs, including $500,000 transferred annually to the General Fund in
support of various Citywide programs. The City Attorney has concluded that RAP is entitled to
the "net proceeds" ascribed to this asset through a concession, where "net proceeds" are
gross revenues less expenditures for operation and maintenance. To determine RAP's proper share of the rent derived from a lease for all 10 of the parking structures, RAP and the City must estimate and agree upon the amount of the rent attributable to Pershing Square. The City Attorney has advised that various factors are relevant to this rent allocation, including, but not limited to, the historical revenue and expense numbers for all of the structures. In general, the working group believes that a private operator will generate more value from the Pershing Square garage, and this additional value should be available to support RAP operations within the funding requirements of the City Charter.

I added the emphasis because the problem lies in the determination of revenue to the parks if it's included in the package, an issue the mayor who had demonstrated so little respect for the rule of law would like to ignore.

According to an email from the City Attorney's Office, the mayor wants to know "why the (Rec and Parks) Board of Commissioners could not agree to receive payment from the General Fund during the 50 year term of the lease (e.g., $2 million per year for 50 years)."

"It was explained that monies received from revenues earned by the department are required by Charter Section 593 (c) to be placed in the RAP fund, and that more specifically pursuant to Charter Section 596 (a) (5), proceeds from leasing the subsurface space for operation of a public parking structure 'shall be paid into the Recreation and Parks Fund.' The Charter is clear and does not provide a basis for the Board or anyone else to waive its requirements. The Charter can only be changed by an amendment approved by the voters."

Under the Charter, Pershing Square gets specific protections because it was deeded to Rec and Parks specifically to provide funding to it. Rec and Parks also gets a piece of the city's property tax revenue which provides most of its funding.

In theory, those funds are safe even as Rec and Parks is getting hit with a $25 million bill for water and power and reduced general fund support. But theories are cheap and city officials are looking for even more, thus the attempt to raid the Pershing Square revenue.

The City Attorney's Office advised the mayor and others that raiding that money likely would lead to a taxpayer lawsuit.

"We also advised that the potential consequences of violating the Charter are that an action for declaratory relief and injunction could be brought by any taxpayer. The likely result of such a lawsuit would be that payment to the RAP Fund would be compelled, with interest, and attorney's fees and costs would have to be paid by the City's General Fund," the email said.

"If an arrangement that would violate the Charter is included in the lease, the City Attorney would not be able to approve the lease. If an arrangement that would violate the Charter is included in a public report to the Board of Recreation and Park Commissioners or any other City body, the City Attorney would be compelled to comment on the Charter requirements."

So that leaves the parking deal up in the air -- something City Council members are set to ignore by including the $53 million in next year's budget.

They will undoubtedly try to get around the City Charter by allocating a portion of the $53 million to Rec and Parks but will it be a fair allocation?

Pershing Square is the most profitable city parking structure with the two that are larger -- Cinerama Dome and Hollywood & Highland -- both losing money hard as that might be to believe.

It is the plum in the deal. Private operators would almost certainly raise the daily rate of $15.40, even double it, and sharply cut operational costs, much as they will do to all the other lots.

City Hall has the option of continuing to operate Pershing Square and the other parking lots but that would take investment and skilled management and lower cost structures. But it wouldn't provide all that upfront cash now in exchange for future revenue.

The city could lease Pershing Square separately, leaving the revenue stream with Rec & Parks but that wouldn't avoid having to lay off city workers since the leasing of the nine other structures wouldn't generate nearly as much to the general fund.

Call it the Pershing Square Dilemma, just one example of the many problems city officials are facing because they are incapable of facing the budget crisis head-on.

Let's be perfectly clear about this: There is nothing the mayor and City Council know today about LA's dire financial straits that they didn't know when they cut the sweetheart early retirement and contract deals with city workers, gave raises to the DWP, borrowed against the future and papered over the problem to buy a few months' reprieve.

They have no excuses. They are all culpable. They must all be replaced.

If they had any honor, if they cared about anything but themselves, they would resign and make way for a new generation of leaders who share a vision of a great city and have the courage to take the tough steps needed to create it.

The LA Clean Sweep campaign (lacleansweep.com) is looking for seven good men and women to challenge for the even-numbered Council seats in the city election next March, people who respect every segment of the community and will stand up for the interests of the whole city.

The days of government owned by city unions, developers, contractors, consultants and political operatives are numbered. They have enriched themselves off the public dole and left us with an aging infrastructure, backlogs of broken roads, sidewalks and water pipes that would take until the 22nd century to fix at the current rate of repair.

They have known they were running a massive budget deficit and carrying billions of dollars in unfunded pension costs for years. They knew more than 18 months ago just how serious the city's money troubles were and they have only made things worse.

Today, David Zahniser in the Times reports city officials have suddenly discovered it costs them nearly as much to lay off city workers as to keep them on the payroll. That's because they owe 15,000 civilian workers nearly 6 percent raises next year if even one worker is laid off or one furlough is required.

Through all the tedious months of budget haggling, the only goal has been to protect city workers' jobs, pensions and lifetime health benefits while looking for back door ways of raising taxes, fees and rates, and slashing public services.

They still are bickering over just how to do achieve that without actually fixing what's broken.

City government simply costs too much and delivers too little. It is inefficient and productivity is too low. The middle class is being squeezed by policies that amount to a bizarre notion of municipal socialism as if redistributing the wealth of working people to the rich and poor can achieve anything positive.

The only way out of this morass is a new deal for city workers and the public. Having squandered all leverage with the unions with their incompetent bungling, the threat of bankruptcy is the only way to force things to a head.

Do the unions, including the IBEW, want to talk terms of a new deal under Chapter 9 to a bankruptcy judge or to the city's elected leadership?

That's the point I think Dick Riordan is making by showing how bankruptcy is inevitable unless there is a radical shift in direction.

Retirement age moved from 55 to 60 or 65, a step back on wages, a tax plan that shares the burden and puts the city on a sound financial footing -- those are among the ways to provide job security and protect services.

Sooner or later, this whirling dervish dance around reality will come to end. Reality always wins. The only question is how much damage will be done in the meantime.

You can tell a lot about a guy from the people he chooses as his friends -- and his enemies.

The mayor counts as friends a circle that includes lobbyists, developers and big shots who are getting rich off of the public business and see opportunities to get even richer.

And there' are people like Brian D'Arcy -- the DWP union boss who thinks labor negotiations are a game of blackmail and gets spectacular union contracts and promises of thousands of more jobs from the mayor when everybody else is hurting and taking pay cuts or losing jobs.

Then, there are his enemies, enemies of his own making, people like the DWP managers he dismisses collectively as incompetent and recalcitrant without having the guts to offer specific names or do anything about them during his five years as mayor.

And City Attorney Carmen Trutanich has become Antonio's Enemy No.1 because he poses the greatest danger as the only independent elected city official, the only one who isn't owned by the same crowd of insider profiteers that hover around everyone else in City Hall.

The mayor's way of dealing with Trutanich is to break his promises and gut his department by slashing his budget by more than a third this year and next.

Trutanich is no one to be messed with lightly. He fired off a letter to the mayor and put it up on his website accusing Antonio of political cynicism and "a remarkable lack of leadership and imagination" that puts "public safety and the protection of taxpayer dollars at substantial risk."

"You have apparently lost faith in and given up on the innate ingenuity and work ethic of its residents and employees, who have suggested and implemented innovative cost-saving measures that can lead us through these challenging budgetary times. Moreover, your proposed Budget fails to recognize the core missions of the City and thereby continues to place public safety and the protection of taxpayer dollars at substantial risk.

"In short, your proposals will only exacerbate the budget crisis looming in the future and appear to be motivated by some agenda other than the continued success of all of the public safety offices in this City, including the City Attorney's Office."

Trutanich notes the mayor's budget only cuts his own office's spending by 2.6 percent 2.6% r, and "despite a so-called 'hard hiring freeze' for other City employees, your office continues to hire political staff."

The impact on losing 100 more attorneys, Trutanich said, will be dramatic in terms of his ability to defend the city against $2 billion in pending liability claims and will force him to discontinue prosecuting discretionary cases involving "gang injunctions and related prosecutions; the Safer City Initiative; the Neighborhood Prosecutor Program; the Citywide Nuisance Abatement Program; the Housing and Problem Properties Program; environmental and consumer protection; code or "broken window" enforcement; domestic violence
prosecutions; and many other non-priorable criminal offenses."

For a political cynic like the mayor, the decision to go to war is a big mistake, a blunder that violates the first precept in Machiavelli's bible of political manipulation: Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.

The disintegration of the mayor's political strategy is happening so fast it is hard to keep up. But the signs of his desperation are clear enough.

He dismissed the likes of Eli Broad and RIchard Riordan from the day he took office as mayor and then suddenly, as budget crisis was crashing down on him, turned to them and surrendered his authority to their guy Austin Beutner, a fabulously rich corporate takeover financier with nothing better to do since he fell off a bike and nearly killed himself.

Three months later, Beutner has become the extra-legal de facto mayor, calling the shots in nearly a dozen key departments on everything from economic development to the sale of city assets to reduce the massive budget deficits.

This week he took on yet another major job for his dollar-a-year salary as interim general manager of the Department of Water and Power, a dual role that tramples on the city charter's intent to provide checks and balances to ensure civilian oversight on policy and prevent corruption.

Interviewed by Warren Olney on KCRW's Which Way LA? (link to podcast, Beutner comes up at 27:45 minute mark), the 9th DWP boss in 10 years showed he was a quick study in the fine art of saying little specific but implying a great deal, thus leaving all his options open: Get a green energy plan together, be transparent enough to sell it so he can get the rate hikes the mayor wants and reduce the political tensions enough to be able to hire a professional utility manager for the first time in years.

Even as he was chatting with Olney, the mayor was praising D'Arcy as "part of the solution" and waving his enemies list in front of editors and reporters at the LA Times, defaming without naming names the DWP management as ""wall to wall...at the highest levels...the biggest defenders of the status quo."

"For four years, I've battled a bureaucracy that just won't respond to the policy direction," Villaraigosa said. "It's been an absolute war. Getting through that Byzantine bureaucracy is very difficult…. We've got to figure out a way to make that agency more transparent.

"They undermined [former General Manager Ronald] Deaton, they undermined [former General Manager David] Nahai. Even [outgoing General Manager S. David] Freeman. I'm talking about that upper-level management…. You can't fire them. They just go back to the Civil Service system" and they lose about $15,000 in salary as well as their city-provided cars, but they stay in the DWP. They out-wait you. They've out-waited everybody."

The funny thing about that is Nick Patsaouras told him the same thing two years ago with the only difference being that the then DWP Commission President identified by name those who wanted to open up the books and were capable of doing a good job and those in the way.

Patsaouras got fired for his trouble and his solution, creation of a Rate Payer Advocate, was killed because transparency was the last thing the mayor wanted.

But it has reared its head and left the mayor and his allies scrambling to derail it by putting it under the control of the compliant Controller Wendy Greuel even as some members of the City Council are showing signs of getting uppity with an awakening public demanding better of them than they have seen in a long time.

Read Trutanich's letter in full, a declaration of war between elect officials in LA that has no precedent in recent history:

UPDATE: Read Austin Beutner's letter to DWP workers at OurLA.org.

It wouldn't be make believe if anyone in their right mind still believed in Antonio.

He couldn't even get more than one round of applause from his hand-picked audience of contributors at his State of the City speech, and that was for the one thing that has gone right under his watch, the reduction in violent crime.

The budget plan he outlined Tuesday night is nothing but a work of fiction by a mayor so desperate to save himself he is willing to destroy his city -- a compilation of wishful thinking on revenue projections and fantasies of income from fire sales of assets.

It is loaded with one-time savings and revenues that even if they materialize will only help get through the coming year's $484 million deficit while leaving the 2011-12 deficit of $775 million and the following year's $1 billion deficit untouched.

He must be stopped before he harms us all.

Some people learn from their mistakes, not Antonio. He got us into this mess doing exactly what he is proposing to do again: Chasing numbers downhill and using smoke and mirrors to avoid reality.

He's probably the only man in America who still believes the Obama economic miracle will lift the city's ship back to normal. There isn't going to be any economic miracle. Normal isn't coming back. Fundamental economic changes are occurring.

We can no longer use City Hall as a jobs and social welfare program, as a bottomless pit of wealth for sweetheart contracts with unions, contractors and consultants and to subsidize developers whose projects make the quality of our lives and our neighborhoods worse.

Surely, De Facto Mayor Austin Beutner understands this as well as anybody. He made his fortune buying up distressed companies on the cheap, scaling costs to revenue, focusing on the core business and then selling them for spectacular profits.

As the mayor's top gun, he has been given direct authority over every city agency that impacts revenue and. in a move that is extra-legal, has crossed the line and handed direct control of the Department of Water and Power as its general manager.

What does that say about the pretense of separation of powers, of citizen commission's providing oversight on politicians and bureaucrats when as the mayor's man Beutner is part of the authority that appoints the DWP Board and as general manager he reports to the board he appoints?

Is there a secret memo somewhere in the dungeons of City Hall that says martial law was declared as part of the fiscal emergency and the rule of law suspended?

The City Council must stop this abuse of power by rejecting Beutner's appointment or at the least force him to resign as deputy mayor for appearances sake, if nothing else.

The same is true of the mayor's budget. The Council is as much responsible for this crisis as he is and now has one last chance to put an end to these phony money games that are rapidly moving LA down the road to oblivion and bankruptcy and made our city the laughing stock of the world.

"I understand your utility is going bankrupt and your city with it," German Chancellor Angela Merkel told Beutner at an exclusive Getty Center event Monday night during a visit presumably to scout around for some bargains in public assets to pick up for 10 cents on the Euro.

David Zahniser in the LA Times all but ignores the budget in his story on the mayor's speech by focusing on the dizzying pendulum swings in direction and message that Antonio, Controller Wendy Greuel and the Council have engaged in for the last year, from early retirements to 4,000 layoffs to today's "not to worry, we fixed everything" sound bite.

"When the information is that confusing and that contradictory, the public doesn't know what to believe -- except to distrust anything they're told," said Westside community leader Mike Eveloff,  president of the Tract 7260 Homeowners Assn.

The mayor's handlers regard all this as nothing but a public relations exercise in need of a "more consistent message."

Antonio himself clearly agrees, deflecting all responsibility for the crisis he created by falsely claiming he's gotten city spending under control during his reign of profligate hiring, wage increases and giveaways of the public's money.

All that's wrong is the fault of Wall Street and the global recession and some mysterious force that obscured Southern California's eternal sunshine.

"Over the last several weeks, we have allowed darkness to cloud our optimism. I think that you could even say that we have allowed the strain of the challenges we face to undermine civic unity."

Unity? He barely got a majority a year ago against Walter Moore and eight others with little money or name recognition despite his own fame and bottomless pit of dirty political money.

Maybe he means how he achieved the impossible and united the citizenry and public employee unions in opposition to his policies and politics and even gotten the business community to suffer a crisis of confidence in his leadership to the point that only the promises made to them by unelected mayor Beutner has kept them in line.

Antonio is right about a couple of things:e thing: This isn't why he was elected to office and it is going to be "a tough time for everyone" -- even him.

The mayor's "sunshine" State of the City speech lasted just 27 minutes and he was interrupted by applause just once with applause by an audience packed with friends and campaign contributors.

Here's how it played in a brilliant six-minute report on KCAL9 Monday night:

Little things can mean a lot, as we all know.

So when we hear about the city running deficits of hundreds of millions of dollars and facing billions of dollars in liabilities, we know things have gone badly wrong but why?

The politicians would have us believe it's the fault of the bad economy but we've learned better day after day as we have seen them grapple the problems caused by their years of failed leadership and mismanagement of city affairs.

We see them panic over the DWP withholding $73 million and send out red alerts of imminent financial catastrophe, proclaim city government will shut down 40 percent of the time, gridlock over $6 million in power rate hikes as if we weren't talking about a city government with nearly $7 billion at its disposal annually and a utility with $4 billion in revenue and $1 billion in cash on hand.

We watch as they talk about 4,000 layoffs but only carry out 33 while transferring hundreds of others to special funds and proprietary departments, some of them getting raises of up to 50 percent instead of pink slips and unemployment checks.

We get the picture clear enough: Things are bad and getting worse.

Let me fill in one small detail that will help bring this picture into focus and help you understand why our parks and libraries are closing and the basic services we all rely on are being slashed and they are imposing fees and rate hikes, planning tax increases and selling assets.

It's the case of Environmental Affairs Department General Manager Detrich Brown Allen, Council File Number 10-0404.

Unfortunately for Ms. Allen, her department was eliminated as a cost-cutting measure and with it, her $152,299 a year job.

But all is not lost. Ms. Allen has accepted a demotion to environmental affairs officer within the Department of Transportation, a position that pays $122,607. There is upside since she no longer is working at the pleasure of the mayor and now has Civil Service protections and like all other city employees, her pension someday will be based on the highest salary she earned as a city worker.

If you have listened even occasionally to City Council meetings during the last 10 months, you know that for all the occasional lip service paid to the impact of what is happening on LA's four million people and its hundreds of thousands of businesses, the real work that has been done involved protecting the wages, benefits and jobs of city workers.

That should come as no surprise since our elected officials regard city government as a jobs program, not a services provider.

And so it is with Ms. Allen.

Why should she lose anything just because she was demoted, her responsibilities diminished, her department eliminated?

"In order that Ms. Allen not be harmed by the elimination of the General Manager's position, it is recommended that her salary be V-rated to maintain her current salary level," City Administrative Officer Miguel Santana wrote March 10.

"The EERC and the City Council have previously approved V-rates for other employees whose positions were eliminated. The EERC approved a V-rate for Ms. Allen on March 2, 2010.

"Because the class of Environmental Affairs Officer is represented by SEIU 721,
the V-rate must be included in the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU). The V-rate has
already been discussed with the union and they have agreed to include it in the MOU."

I added the emphasis to make sure you notice that the mayor and City Council leaders not only approved this gift to Ms. Allen but they have "previously approved" the same deal for other city workers whose jobs were eliminated.

And the union that is so strenuously fighting to save the jobs and salaries of the city's lowest-paid workers agrees to these kinds of deals for six-figure employees even though they are taking money out of the pockets of the people they represent --- unless, of course, a way is found as usual to sock it to the public to pay the bills.

Last Wednesday, the Council Personnel Committee approved Ms. Allen's $30,000 a year gift and sent it to the full Council.

But don't let this worry you, it won't add to the $222 million general fund deficit this year, or the $484 million deficit year, or the nearly $800 million deficit the year after, or the $1 billion deficit the year after.

"The cost to the Department of Transportation will be fully funded by the Mobile Source Fund and there will be no fiscal impact to the General Fund," Santana noted.

I hope this helps fill in some detail in the picture you hold in your mind of what's happening at City Hall as they juggle the books and raid special funds for special purposes and protect the same old special interests at your expense.

One of the universal signs of businesses going bankrupt is that they don't know how much money is coming in or going out and their future projections miss the mark by double-digit percentages.

The reason is obvious: Bumbling boobs are in charge, or in the case of LA, bobblehead bums.

During four straight quarters, city financial analysts missed their revenue estimates by more than 10 percent.

Even so, they warned over and over that this year was going to be bad and the next year worse and far worse in the years following.

But the man who likes to see himself as courageous and a bubbling brook of brand-new ideas went against their advice -- and his own public and private statements -- to reject the folly of a sweetened early retirement package that is only now nearly complete in sending 2,400 senior employees off on pensions averaging $55,000 while mostly still in their 50s.

The City Council was no better so nine months later we are mistreated to last week's theatrical war over DWP rates -- a spectacular tragi-comedy that seemed impossible to top -- but somehow the magical world of Main Street did it this week.

On Monday, Out-of-Controller Wendy Greuel issued a proclamation so dark and dire it caused panic in the city and credit rating agencies to downgrade LA once again: "This is the most urgent fiscal crisis that the City has faced in recent history, and it is imperative that you act now." 

The mayor acted quickly and pulled the strings on the windbag David Freeman to send the city reeling with his declaration that the DWP with a billion dollars in cash lying around in desks and drawers would not deliver the $73.5 million it promised: "We have deficits, not surplus...There is no surplus money to transfer at this time."


That was Tuesday. The next day the mayor came out fighting and announced he was shutting down city government unless he got the massive DWP rate hikes he wants for purposes that are far from clear: "There are no easy decisions or simple ways to solve this budget crisis. But as the CEO of this great city, it is my responsibility to make these difficult but necessary decisions to steer the city out of this crisis and onto solid financial ground."

Of course, he was just blowing hot air like his order to lay off 1,000 city workers or was it 2,000 or 4,000 -- only 33 have actually been axed two months later. It took only one minute Wednesday for the Council to show the mayor once again was trying to be an autocrat without authority when he ordered two-day-a-week furloughs for most of the workers who actually provide services directly to the public.

The only power he does have to act unilaterally is to bludgeon commissioners and bureaucrats into submission to his will, compromising their integrity and soiling their reputations -- a power he and his minions are using mercilessly, which goes a long way toward explaining why the city is falling apart.

So Thursday morning, a slightly chastened mayor deigned to meet behind closed doors with Council leaders. It took two hours to find a fig leaf to cover his naked posturing -- a $30 million windfall that arrived overnight we can only presume in a brown paper bag.