"Villaraigosa Wants You to Play Budget, Just Don't Touch the LAPD" By Zach Behrens in "News" on February 16, 2010. LAist Blog.
http://laist.com/2010/02/16/villaraigosas_budget_challenge_leav.php
Here's another example to show you that the Mayor's digging in his heels to resist cuts for the LAPD. This is from February 16th, a couple of weeks ago, and the story should be no surprise since the Mayor has never accepted the fact that keeping the current level of officers is very expensive.
The real bit of enlightenment here is the small but informative chart that shows the key parts of the city budget categories. It shows howthe General and Special funds differ in dollar and employee sizes as parts of the entire city government. You can see the relative sizes to help see the sizes of what we are dealing with as the budget crisis becomes more of a critical care item with each passing day.
The city council is really at about full panic level, ready to sell off anything not nailed down- and that would be a mistake by getting some money for immediate use, but still having additional deficits for the next fiscal years to face.
City Council members have voiced ideas to raise money that include just about anything short of setting up a lemonade stand or having a bake sale. Some ideas stateby by council members: setting up a gift shop in City Hall (Hahn), selling DWP water as a commercial product (Alarcon), using the LAPD Academy to train for other agencies and individuals as Rio Hondo does, setting up a fee-based training for security guard firearms training, and a few other things that get into the city competing with the private sector.
They are becoming more desperate and it's all to make a call for more taxes for all of us to bail them out under the threat of losing vital services. And it was not OUR fault for all this, was it? But you don't get any real acceptance of blame, just a lot of dancing around the issues as Eric Garcetti continues to tell city employees "We are Family," something that solves nothing other than to keep the employees on their jobs for the sake of keeping them on their jobs, and not based on functions fulfilled by any certain types of employees.
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