I AM SHOCKED. LA IS BROKE. Is that ethically, morally, economically or all three. They had 1,000 fire hydrants they refused to fix. Billions in money for the homeless they can not account for. Water facilities without water. Illegal aliens getting massive freebies—yet the city is running a $400 million deficit. Rule of Law—not in a town with a Marxist Mayor.
“Twenty-three-year-old Andres Perkins says there is an intersection in Reseda’s business district that floods every year when it rains, and there are broken sidewalks everywhere.
It’s been like this for years, Perkins said. He recalled watching his grandfather fix one of those broken sidewalks outside their Encino home, more than 15 years ago, after a woman walking by got distracted by a guava tree and tripped over a sidewalk that had been buckled by tree roots.
Perkins says it’s things like this that make it feel like LA leaders are overwhelmed, and struggling to manage the city’s budget in order to pay for LA’s needs.”
But the have all the money they want to protect criminals from foreign nations! This is a dead town—will the next Mayor preside over the memorial services?
Los Angeles is broke — and LA people can feel it
You don’t have to be a budget wonk to know what’s happening with the city budget in Los Angeles.
by Elizabeth Chou03/06/2025 LA Public Press, 03/04/2025 https://lapublicpress.org/2025/03/la-city-budget-broke/
LA is broke, and for many Angelenos, the cracks are evident.
Twenty-three-year-old Andres Perkins says there is an intersection in Reseda’s business district that floods every year when it rains, and there are broken sidewalks everywhere.
It’s been like this for years, Perkins said. He recalled watching his grandfather fix one of those broken sidewalks outside their Encino home, more than 15 years ago, after a woman walking by got distracted by a guava tree and tripped over a sidewalk that had been buckled by tree roots.
Perkins says it’s things like this that make it feel like LA leaders are overwhelmed, and struggling to manage the city’s budget in order to pay for LA’s needs.
“It just feels like there’s so many issues that they’re getting lost in the whole, huge mess of issues that they say they can’t pay for,” Perkins said of city leaders.
“It’s just really frustrating to see that there’s, like thousands, millions of people being affected by just the lack of action and poor budgeting, and [not only] not prioritizing our infrastructure, but also our people in our communities,” he said.
City officials said Tuesday they are projecting a nearly $400 million shortfall in the upcoming budget year. That update followed news from the City Controller on Friday that revenues will come in even less than expected.
That means LA leaders will enter upcoming budget discussions for the next fiscal year with very few dollars to work with. Last year, to balance the budget, they slashed $250 million, partly by cutting 1,700 unfilled jobs. They also instituted a hiring freeze. The budget lays out city leaders’ priorities for how public dollars are used toward parks, libraries, firefighting, trash-pickup, roads, and other basic services and amenities. Last year, faced with a potential $300 million budget gap, they prioritized giving raises of $1 billion over four years to police officers, and another $1 billion in raises for civilian workers.
They also had to dip heavily into the city’s rainy-day funds to keep afloat, including to cover lawsuit payouts. As a result, they started the year below the 5% minimum level the city tries to set to maintain healthy reserves.
The bills are piling up again.
In December, less than halfway through this fiscal year, the city administrative officer reported the city was $296.14 million in the red, and warned to not expect a rosy financial future. Now the challenge feels even bigger, with the latest budget numbers from Feb. 28 showing the city is overspending by $300.54 million, up by more than $4 million from December.
The overspending is partly due to costs from the fire in Pacific Palisades. City budget officials continue to compile damage costs, which could amount to nearly $300 million, although they have said this figure is preliminary.
One of the biggest costs to the city has been its ballooning liabilities from lawsuits, which are around $100 million. That includes a large chunk related to the lawsuits filed against the Los Angeles Police Department and accidents related to infrastructure, like broken sidewalks. Adding to the budget turmoil, credit-rating agencies are concerned there will also be increased liability costs due to the wildfires, according to last week’s financial status report.
Revenues from sources such as property taxes are also coming in more slowly than anticipated, according to a December update from the CAO that pointed to how the city has been relying too heavily on emergency funds just to balance the budget. Separately, a forecast issued Friday by Controller Kenneth Mejia projected the city’s revenues this year will be short by $140 million.
In preparation for the next fiscal year, which starts July 1, city department managers were recently asked by the city administrative officer to conduct an exercise where they would each cut their budgets by about 6%.
The first big step in the budgeting process is for LA Mayor Karen Bass to release a budget proposal. That proposal is set to come out in late April. The City Council will then review and can modify the budget, before adopting it by June 1.
With less money available, the city has certain options to balance the budget, like using rainy day reserves, raising fees or getting taxes passed, as well as cutting costs, said Controller Kenneth Mejia. So setting priorities about what is really needed becomes even more important, at a time like this, he said, with “hard choices” needing to be made.
“In order to get out of this mess, the city needs to come to real grips [with] and be really aware of what they’re voting for when this next budget comes around,” Mejia said.
Meanwhile, Ed Mendoza of Jefferson Park, said city leaders seem “indifferent” to the way the city runs. He feels like they “just kind of gave up and [the city is] just kind of functioning.
Mendoza says he notices this lack of care during his bike rides through the city. “A lot of street lamps are not on. The streets are way darker today than they were a couple years ago, and that’s scary,” he said.
Mendoza called the city’s inability to pay for what Angelenos need “a tragedy,” saying the city’s not meeting the needs of its people, who are “resilient … No, no, the people are good. Angelenos are strong. It’s just, I don’t know. It’s just how the city is structured … its bureaucracy.”
In Van Nuys, Giselle Harrell, who is unhoused, said she feels the impact of the city’s budgeting decisions in the way that the police and other city agencies have harassed her, especially during the frequent sanitation sweeps in the places that she lives.
Harrell had lived on Aetna Street near a Metro station, part of an encampment community that stuck together against ongoing sanitation sweeps that upended their lives, including following an Inside Safe operation that led to fencing being set up along the sidewalk there. She has since moved to a different encampment nearby.
“I’m a mom, I’m a auntie,” she said. “I’m an American citizen trying to do my best to survive. I’m not trying to harm or hurt anybody. I’m just trying to live my best life.” But she said that LA’s leaders who set up the budget don’t seem to want to talk to people in her boat, which appears to have made it hard to know how to best serve constituents like herself, whose ranks continue to grow.
Another Angeleno who has noticed that the city appears ill-equipped to handle Angelenos’ needs is Billion Godsun, whose organization Africa Town Coalition runs an open air market in Leimert Park. He said city leaders prioritize the Los Angeles Police Department’s budget – at the expense of Angelenos’ other needs. It’s “really running the people in the city down,” he said.
With the Olympics, and other international events coming to the Los Angeles area in just a few years, LA leaders like Mayor Karen Bass ought to at least be “balancing the interest of the corporate agenda with the needs of the people,” Godsun said. The mayor’s office did not respond to a request for comment regarding Godsun’s comments on the budget.
In her message that accompanied the adopted budget for this year, Bass said that last year’s cuts to vacant positions were meant to “prioritize actual service delivery.” She said that those “vacant positions do not fill potholes, sweep streets or staff parks – and too many of these positions have remained open and on the books for years because of flawed budgeting that does not reflect how departments should actually operate.”
City leaders have also struggled to shorten the amount of time it takes to hire people for city jobs, with some applicants needing to go through laborious and lengthy hiring processes. Existing city workers have also needed to take overtime hours to perform duties that some vacant positions were meant to fill.
From the outside looking in, Los Angeles may seem ready for the world, Godsun said. “For somebody who doesn’t know, LA is the place to be,” he said. “But for those of us who have lived here, who have grown up here, went to school here, worked here, it’s becoming unaffordable.”
Godsun says their group partners with Black Lives Matter-Los Angeles to help conduct a survey on what people want the city’s budget to focus on. The results of that survey are gathered into the People’s Budget LA, an independently done report by a community group that gets submitted to city leaders.
Godsun says he is seeing different needs in his neighborhood, like “helping property owners, and in turn, the property owners can lighten up some on renting.” And he says more attention should be placed on “finding incentives to increase people’s wages to where, you know, working a single job, you can actually help you pay for a decent place to live.”
Godsun said his group, Africa Town Coalition,originally wanted to help get support for local “brick and mortar” businesses in their community, but it ended up needing to focus on the housing crisis, with gentrification of their neighborhoods “pricing people out of their home … their apartments.” Homelessness started to become more of a priority for their group to address, he said.
“Our membership has also dealt with homelessness at different points,” Godsun said. “I myself was living out of my car, in hotels for a while, but it’s almost unavoidable, especially in the Black community, because you’re either being forced out of the city or state.”
It’s affecting residents from the “wealthiest” communities like View Park, “who we’ve seen pushed out of their homes after they lose their jobs after COVID,” Godsun said. “No matter how comfortable people think they are at that moment, this issue [of homelessness] at the rate that it’s going, has the potential to affect most people here.”
