LA Mayor Bass says $12.8B budget will focus on homelessness and potholes

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass is proposing a city budget of $12.8 billion for the 2024-25 fiscal year – a decrease of $293 million (about 2%) from the current fiscal year as the city grapples with rising labor costs and other expenses, plus lower-than-expected revenues.

Despite an overall decrease in planned spending, officials insist the city will continue prioritizing funding for key areas such as homeless programs, public safety and basic city services like filling potholes or picking up trash.

“We know that we will face challenging times amid national, state and local economic uncertainty. … This budget continues our momentum toward change by prioritizing city services – core city services,” Bass said during a news conference Monday, April 22, to announce the release of her plan.

Over the next few weeks, the City Council’s budget committee will go over Bass’ budget proposal and make revisions to it before sending it back to the mayor to sign.

Below are highlights of Bass’ proposed budget for the fiscal year starting on July 1.

Homelessness

The mayor’s proposed spending plan calls for $950 million to fund homeless programs, including $185 million for her signature Inside Safe program. That’s an overall decrease of about $350 million (27%) in homelessness spending and a decrease of $65 million (26%) for Inside Safe specifically.

Members of Bass’ administration noted that projects funded by Proposition HHH, a 10-year bond measure that voters approved in 2016 to build affordable housing, is winding down. The result is less spending overall on homeless-related line items in the budget, they said.

The mayor also noted that some services are being provided in partnership with the county, resulting in reduced costs for the city.

But just because overall spending for homeless programs is expected to decrease, the mayor insisted that the city will continue to treat the homeless crisis as an emergency.

“We will strengthen the services for the people that we have now in interim housing, and we believe that we will continue to move forward in reducing street homelessness as well as moving people from interim to permanent” housing, Bass said.

Los Angeles Police Department

Bass proposed setting aside just under $2 billion for the Los Angeles Police Department. Of that amount, $1.87 billion would pay for LAPD employee salaries – an increase of $145 million over the current year’s adopted budget.

The city settled contracts with its rank-and-file officers last August and, more recently, with its higher-ranking officers.

Bass said the budget focuses on recruiting and retaining police officers and includes funding for full Police Academy classes in hopes of reaching a staffing goal of 9,084 sworn officers.

Whether the city will reach its goal this coming year remains to be seen. Last month, the mayor’s office announced that the LAPD had received over 1,200 job applications in January – the most in two years. But up to now, hiring has remained a challenge — in part due to the city’s slow hiring process. The mayor’s proposed budget calls for more workers to conduct background checks so that people applying to become cops can be hired more quickly.

“We are going to do everything we can to aggressively recruit,” Bass said Monday while acknowledging that police departments nationwide are also facing hiring challenges.

City staffing levels and services

Aside from raises for LAPD officers, the city recently settled contracts with the majority of its civilian workforce. All up, the raises are expected to cost the city several billion dollars over the next several years.

Bass defended those contracts on Monday.

“We must pay fair wages for those who keep us safe and those who improve our city each and every day, like sanitation workers, pothole repair teams, police officers, traffic safety officers, custodians and more,” said Bass, who called paying workers fairly “the right thing to do.”

While Bass’ budget does call for eliminating about 2,000 vacant positions, more than 5,000 vacant positions would remain on the books.

“We will continue to hire for critical positions,” Bass said.

In addition, the mayor’s proposed budget calls for $1.8 million to modernize the city’s MyLA311 system to improve accountability and respond quicker to resident’s requests for services like picking up bulky trash items, trimming trees and repairing sidewalks.

Other highlights of the budget include:

— Funding to hire more firefighters and paramedics. That will include funding the maximum number of training classes that the fire department can handle and continuing the Emergency Appointment Paramedic Program since the majority of calls to the fire department are medical emergencies.

— $2.5 million for equipment and technology updates for the fire department, prompted by the fire under the 10 Freeway that temporarily shut down a portion of the freeway near downtown L.A. in November.

— $13.1 million for street lights and the prevention of copper wire theft;

— $35.7 million for sidewalk improvements;

— $24.6 million in fleet vehicle replacements and $14 million to purchase electric buses for the city’s Commuter Express service; and

— $1.2 million for 150 more electric-vehicle chargers in low-income neighborhoods.

Balancing the budget

City Administrative Officer Matt Szabo previously reported that the city faced a $469 million deficit due to lower-than-expected tax revenues and overspending associated with public-safety overtime, liability claims, inflation and other issues.

To help balance the budget, the mayor’s budget would eliminate 2,139 positions, which would save the city about $180 million, Szabo said Monday.

In addition, the mayor’s office said that while the city’s charter requires the city to maintain an emergency and contingency reserve totaling 5% of the general fund budget, Bass’ proposed budget would keep reserve levels at 7.91% despite the financial challenges the city is facing.

Szabo said the mayor’s proposed budget “provides a path to absorb sluggish revenues and rising costs and puts the city on a path to a structurally balanced budget with surpluses in the out years.”

“Our projections indicate that although the city will still face challenges in the coming years and deficits in the immediate term, that the city will turn those deficits into surpluses by fiscal 28-29,” he said.

City News Service contributed reporting.