Ron Kaye is the former editor of the Los Angeles Daily News. For more, visit Fox & Hounds Daily.
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.