The Brief

Faced with shrinking revenue and growing labor costs in Los Angeles, Mayor Karen Bass presented a stark budget Monday that lowers funding for her signature homelessness initiative and reduces the authorized strength of the police force — in part because of recruiting problems.

Bass also proposed eliminating more than 2,100 city jobs, most of them already vacant, including hundreds in the city’s Park and Recreation Department.

The mayor’s $12.8 billion spending plan is for the fiscal year that begins July 1, and represents a 2.3% reduction from the current fiscal year’s budget of $13.1 billion.

The City Council, which must approve it, will consider her proposal in the coming weeks.

Bass said her plan addresses the needs of Angelenos, and she said her budget comes “amidst national, state and local economic uncertainty driven by broad economic trends and the coming national election.”

“This budget continues our momentum toward change by prioritizing core city services,” the mayor said.

L.A.'s Chief Administrative Officer Matt Szabo said sales, hotel and property taxes were projected to grow at a paltry 1% in the coming year largely because of higher interest rates and rising inflation.

Szabo called eliminating vacant jobs “the essential component” to balancing the budget, saving approximately $180 million.

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

In a statement late Monday, the city Controller's Office said it agreed with the mayor that it was time for a budget "reset" and commended Bass for committing to a strategic approach to tackling four more years of projected deficits.

But the office disagreed with any notion that the cuts in the proposed budget would not affect city services.

"Unfortunately, virtually every department will be hit with reductions in their ability to deliver current (and future) services," read the emailed statement from Chief Deputy Controller Rick Cole. "Today, departments are coping with the record high level of vacancies with unsustainable levels of overtime by existing staff, temporary work-arounds and deferral of lower-priority work that cannot be indefinitely postponed."

The statement continued: "Eliminating needed positions just because they are currently vacant will create an ongoing hole in the ability of virtually every department to maintain today’s level of services."

The Controller's Office also warned city authorities against continuing to defer maintenance to existing infrastructure, adding that doing so would cost the city more in the future, including in liability claims.

Bass's proposal includes pay raises for city workers that add $316 million to the budget — an amount that will grow to more than $1 billion annually by 2028.

The City Council approved pay raises for police officers last year and approved raises for tens of thousands of civilian workers last week.

“To retain the city workforce and maintain critical services, we must pay fair wages for those that keep us safe and those that improve our city each and every day,” Bass said.

The mayor also said her plan cuts her own office’s budget by 10%.

Homelessness

Bass is proposing $185 million for her administration’s flagship homelessness program, Inside Safe, which aims to get Angelenos into temporary housing — largely motel rooms. The proposal represents a significant decrease from Inside Safe’s previous budget of $250 million.

Gary Blasi, a UCLA School of Law professor emeritus who studies homelessness, said the declining budget means the city will be able to temporarily house an even smaller fraction of the city’s population of 46,000 unhoused people.

“It's kind of disappointing, seeing that the plan is to continue to do more of the same,” Blasi said. “We've gotten a lot of people into motels. And some of them have stayed there for a period of time. We've not done a good job of getting people into a more sustainable situation.”

The budget proposal allocates $28 million to programs designed to move Inside Safe participants into permanent housing, up from $21 million in the previous budget.

The city has faced criticism over its failure to track key outcomes from billions of dollars in homelessness spending, such as how much it costs to shelter people unable to find permanent housing.

A federal judge recently ordered an audit of the city’s homelessness spending.

While some programs receive major cuts, the mayor’s budget also proposes increases for efforts to stabilize families at risk of falling into homelessness. In the next fiscal year, the city is proposing giving $17 million to Family Source centers, which focus on signing up eligible applicants for social services and support programs.

In the current fiscal year, the budget for the program was $3.2 million.

Police department staffing

The mayor’s plan includes authorization for 9,084 police officers, down from this year’s 9,500. The decline is, in part, a recognition of the recruiting crisis facing the department — and policing in general.

The Los Angeles Police Department graduated an average of 31 recruits in the past 10 academy classes, according to the Los Angeles Times — far below what’s needed to even keep up with attrition.

The department currently has 8,832 officers.

“I will tell you we are doing everything we can to recruit officers,” Bass said.

Other initiatives

At the news conference, the mayor touted an array of smaller initiatives.

Last year, Bass established an Office of Community Safety to prevent crime through community-led approaches to increase safety. The city will continue that work by allocating $50 million to community-based organizations for violence prevention and intervention, civilian crisis response and anti-recidivism services, according to a budget summary.

The budget also allocates funding for transportation electrification, including over $24.5 million in fleet vehicle replacements.

“The fleet will expand to include an increasing number of electric medium and heavy duty work trucks,” according to the summary. The budget also puts forward $14 million to help purchase new buses for the city’s Community Express service.

The budget also allocates $12.9 million to invest in electric vehicle charging stations for the public and city fleets.

Beyond the Rose Bowl and historic bungalows, Pasadena has stranger tales to tell. David Kalbeitzer has been seeking out those stories where rocket science meets the occult and ghosts haunt the city’s grandest buildings.

For Kalbeitzer, a Disney executive who investigates the paranormal in his free time, his fascination with the city’s mysterious side started when he bought a Victorian north of Old Town.

He sensed a spirit at the open house a dozen years ago and took it as a reason to move his family to Pasadena. Then he started learning the city’s history.

David Kalbeitzer, a paranormal investigator from Pasadena, is giving a talk about the city's strange history Saturday night in Old Town.

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Courtesy of David Kalbeitzer

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“I realized, ‘Oh, this place called us just as much as we were looking for it,’” he said.

On Saturday night, he’s sharing the lore he’s collected at Mesmer Mesmer an Old Town shop and event space. While the event is full, there’s a waitlist, and more talks featuring Kalbeitzer are in the works.

A city of ghost stories 

Ask Kalbeitzer about haunted Pasadena, and the list stretches from alleyways to the Colorado Street Bridge to Castle Green, the turreted former hotel overlooking Central Park.

“The Pasadena Playhouse theater is, you know, very haunted,” he added.

He says playgoers have reported hearing disembodied voices.

Theatergoers over the years have described hearing voices and seeing apparitions at the Pasadena Playhouse.

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Jeff Lorch

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Courtesy of Pasadena Playhouse

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“And you look, and there’s no one there, or apparitions that have been seen sort of standing in the corner, and then you walk up, and they kind of disappear,” he said.

As for the spirit that helped draw him to his current Pasadena home?

Kalbeitzer says she’s still around — and his psychic friend Michael Kouri shared her name: Dolores.

“It’s actually haunted by a very kind ghost that looks out for the house, protects my family and has been able to activate our alarm,” he said.

Having a Dolores in the house might send some people running, but Kalbeitzer said he grew up in a haunted house in Idaho Falls, Idaho.

And when his family moved to Charleston, South Carolina, a teenage Kalbeitzer started seeking out places known for paranormal activity.

Rocket science, ritual magic and mind-reading

Having lived in different neighborhoods in L.A., Kalbeitzer says there’s something uniquely otherworldly about Pasadena — and it goes beyond ghost stories.

He said the city has an energy that draws people exploring the unknown, perhaps most famously Jack Parsons.

The rocket pioneer who helped launch the Jet Propulsion Laboratory also practiced ritual magic at his Pasadena home with the likes of L. Ron Hubbard before he founded Scientology.

“Many people call it the occult. I don’t know that I fully subscribe to that, but there is spiritualism and occult mixed in there,” Kalbeitzer said.

Then there was Upton Sinclair, the muckraking author of The Jungle, whose interests while living in Pasadena extended to telepathy and séances.

Upton Sinclair, pictured with his wife Mary Craig Sinclair in 1935, several years after he published a book examining her reported telepathy.

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Los Angeles Times via Wikimedia Commons

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In 1930, Sinclair published Mental Radio, a book about experiments in mind-reading. Albert Einstein provided a preface. Yes, that Einstein, who would spend the following winter at Caltech expanding on the theories of relativity and cosmology.

“Like it’s the craziest mixture of things that were happening at that time and all of it at the same time,” Kalbeitzer said.

A presence in the shop 

The event couldn’t have found a more appropriate venue.

Since opening five months ago in Old Town, Mesmer Mesmer has embraced the dark and mysterious, offering tarot and crystal readings and hosting events on subjects such as hip-hop’s relationship with ghosts.

Tyke O'Brien opened her shop Mesmer Mesmer earlier this year to create a third space and offer books and esoterica alongside clothing.

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Tyke O'Brien

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At that event, a medium told owner Tyke O’Brien she could sense a presence in the shop, which formerly housed a bridal store.

“She goes, ‘Do you ever feel it?’” O’Brien recounted, “And I’m like, ‘I am such a bummer. I really wish I could. How wonderful would that be to be able to?’”

The same can be said for this writer who’s lived and worked in and around Pasadena for years without so much as a brush with the otherworldly.

Kalbeitzer, on the other hand, reports supernatural encounters all around town.

“I think that how you see yourself in the world has a lot more to do with it, and whether you want to have those experiences,” he said.

Los Angeles officials expect construction of a fence around MacArthur Park will start in November and continue through fall 2027. 

At a community meeting Thursday night at MacArthur Park Elementary School, officials said fence installation is now expected to continue through fall 2027, overshooting the previously announced spring 2027 completion date.

Thursday’s meeting highlighted the divide over the city’s plan to fence off MacArthur Park, with tensions rising during public comment. The Los Angeles Police Department says the fence will make drug enforcement easier, while some in the community who volunteer around the park questioned whether it will improve safety enough to justify the cost.

The city has allocated $2.3 million for the project, but officials have not said whether that will cover the full cost.

Installation of the green metal fence around the park’s perimeter is expected to begin in November and take about a year. A second phase, adding decorative elements to the fence, is planned for fall and winter 2027. Officials said the schedule could change because of weather or other unforeseen circumstances.

The park is expected to remain open during construction.

Capt. Ben Fernandes with the LAPD’s Rampart Division said the fence would create a barrier along Alvarado Street and other areas where officers have seen people using narcotics. That would allow police to focus more of their enforcement efforts inside the park, he said.

“So if people are going deeper into the park to use, that’ll make it easier for us to go in and do enforcement on them and arrest them for that use,” Fernandes said. 

MacArthur Park will close every night once an 8-foot-tall fence goes up around the green space, with Los Angeles police officers sweeping the park for encampments and people sleeping there before the gates shut. The Board of Recreation and Park Commissioners approved the plan Thursday.

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LA Recreation and Parks

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“I’ve been an officer for 29 years, and I’ve always known I can go buy drugs there, and I did as a narcotics officer. So what I’m saying is, we are trying to make it not convenient,” he added. 

Fernandes also said the city plans to enhance the park’s existing camera network. LAPD officers and Los Angeles Park Rangers will be able to monitor the cameras from their respective stations, he said. City officials are still evaluating whether additional cameras will be needed to address blind spots in the park after construction is complete.

Ariana Walker, who visits MacArthur Park every Saturday with a group of friends who pool their own resources to distribute food and hygiene kits, questioned whether the city had shown that the fence would improve safety and how much it would cost to maintain.

“The fence is a $2.3 million fence at the base level,” she said. “And they haven’t given us any indication of how much more it’s going to cost for upkeep, to keep anybody safe. There’s no conclusive evidence that a fence is going to stop crime the way that they’re suggesting.”

The meeting grew tense when John Alle, a local property owner whose family owns the building that houses Langer’s Delicatessen across the street from the park, objected to having his comments read from a written comment card rather than speaking directly to officials. Alle has been a vocal critic of the city’s response to drug activity and public safety concerns around MacArthur Park.

He was allowed to comment during the meeting and said the city needs to take a tougher approach to drug use and sales around the park. 

“We see knife attacks at all hours of the day. It’s out of control. And it’s not gotten any better,” he said. “We want to bring it back to where it was 15 or 20 years ago.”

Los Angeles officials expect construction of a fence around MacArthur Park will start in November and continue through fall 2027.

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Gary Coronado

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The LA Local

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Alle pointed to public events at the park, including an upcoming Día de los Muertos celebration and a Labor Day weekend picnic hosted by Los Angeles County District Attorney Nathan Hochman as positive developments for the space. But he added those events do not reflect conditions throughout the park.

Officials also outlined other planned improvements, including restoring access through the tunnels connecting the park’s north and south sides, making accessibility upgrades and providing free Wi-Fi for parkgoers. 

Residents who want to provide input on the fence’s decorative elements can email admin@themorcosgroup.com or call (310) 479-4727 for more information.

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