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.

Cleanup is just beginning for a contaminated industrial site in South Gate, according to U.S. Environmental Protection Agency officials who are leading the effort.

The small southeast L.A. city was built on industry — in the early 20th century it boomed with auto, chemical and other manufacturers.

That legacy also left it with three Superfund sites, areas designated by the federal government as highly contaminated with hazardous waste.

The three sites are all clustered on a large lot framed by Southern and Rayo avenues. A residential neighborhood is nearby.

“This site is less than 50 yards away from a home, so we want to make sure that we clean it to a point where we can feel confident,” said South Gate Mayor Joshua Barron.

South Gate is home to about 90,000 people, the majority of whom are Latino. The median household income is about $74,500 and the state has identified the city and surrounding communities to be disproportionately burdened by pollution and its health effects.

This site, dubbed the Southern Avenue Industrial Area, housed a screw manufacturing business for 30 years, then a carpet adhesive plant. Both businesses are now defunct and the site was designated by the federal government as a Superfund site in 2012.

The pollution at this property was compounded by pollution from companies next door.

One of the two adjacent Superfund sites was used by Cooper Drum Co., a steel drum recycling plant. A group of Cooper Drum’s former customers, including chemical manufacturers and oil companies, are paying for part of that cleanup. The other site, previously operated by an aircraft rivet and conveyor belt manufacturer, is still in the analysis and planning stages.

At the Southern Avenue site where the EPA broke ground Tuesday, analyses commissioned by the agency found widespread lead and other toxic contamination in the soil, as well as a plume of trichloroethylene, a carcinogen, in the groundwater.

Officials say the plume has not affected the deeper aquifer South Gate and other southeast L.A. cities rely on for drinking water.

In 1986, the city closed water wells contaminated by the neighboring Cooper Drum site.

EPA project manager Kelia Liang explains the cleanup effort in South Gate on Tuesday.

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Erin Stone

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LAist

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“ The water is safe to drink,” said Mike Montgomery, superfund director for the EPA. “What we're trying to do is prevent it from becoming impacted.”

EPA officials estimate soil cleanup will take about two months. Groundwater cleanup planning will start in 2027 and could take a year or more. The whole effort is estimated to cost between $45 million and $60 million, primarily through federal dollars.

The summer heat may be sweltering at the moment in Southern California, but predictions about this winter’s El Niño show it could be the strongest on record.

So the LAist newsroom wants to know: What questions do you have? (You can submit below.)

We can tell you now that El Niño is a climate pattern that happens roughly every two to seven years, and is one of the most powerful drivers of the Earth’s weather.

During an El Niño event, the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean off the coast of South America warms to above normal temperatures. The warm ocean adds moisture and heat to the atmosphere, influencing atmospheric circulation, temperatures and precipitation on a massive scale.

El Niño typically results in mild weather in the northern United States and wetter conditions in the southern part of the country.

In Southern California, we could start to see the effects of El Niño in the late fall or early winter. Generally, those effects include significant rain and high sea levels and the consequences that come with them, such as flooding, mudslides and coastal erosion.

Forecasters say there is a more than 90% chance of a powerful El Niño event this year, and a 70% chance that it’s record-setting.

That said, uncertainty remains around how exactly this winter’s El Niño will play out here.

So as you gear up for an El Niño winter, ask us your questions and we’ll do our best to get answers in the months ahead.

The company behind the Garden Grove hazardous waste scare earlier this year is planning to resume full operations in late September, subject to an independently monitored, court-approved safety plan.

GKN Aerospace employs 500 people at its Garden Grove facility.

What happened?

GKN Aerospace said in a news release that it had permanently decommissioned the tank that set off the hazmat scare in May and forced some 50,000 nearby residents to evacuate.

Removal of the tank is pending review and approval from state regulatory agencies, according to an emailed response from Salma Elshakre, a spokesperson for the Orange County Health Care Agency, which is overseeing the cleanup.

All of the toxic chemical, methyl methacrylate (also known as MMA), has been removed from nearby tanks as well, Elshakre said.

What about the compensation fund?

This week, the company also announced a forthcoming $100 million compensation fund for affected residents and businesses. GKN expects to release details on how to apply in the coming months.

What's next?

At least 39 lawsuits have been filed against the company in conjunction with the hazmat incident, according to a GKN webpage set up to track the fallout. The company pledged to explain the legal effect of participating in the compensation fund before it is launched.

What's the community reaction?

Garden Grove Mayor Stephanie Klopfenstein said in a statement that the city “welcome[s] this progress and will continue to expect GKN to address the broader effects on our community.”

A coalition of community groups called GKN Out of Garden Grove Coalition wants the city to shut down the GKN plant completely. The coalition plans to release a report documenting the company’s alleged history of hazardous waste failures at a news conference Tuesday at 5:30 p.m. at 11300 Stanford Ave. in Garden Grove.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration is preparing to revoke the business and tourism visas of up to 200,000 foreigners who have applied for or are currently seeking asylum status in the United States. If it happens, the move would be the largest single mass revocation of visas in U.S. history and would likely face legal challenges.

Unless challenged or revised, the State Department is expected to announce in the coming weeks the revocation of so-called B1 and B2 visas issued between 2016 and 2026 whose holders have sought asylum or are now seeking asylum, according to State Department documents obtained by The Associated Press and two U.S. officials. The action will be taken in coordination with the Department of Homeland Security.

“We are coordinating with DHS to identify and revoke the nonimmigrant visas of foreigners who have come to the United States claiming to be short-term visitors, but then file for asylum to stay here permanently,” said State Department spokesman Tommy Pigott.

He declined to comment on the number of visas that might be revoked, saying “as the process will be ongoing, the number of revocations remains dynamic and will be done on a rolling basis.”

The revocations would not necessarily result in their immediate deportation, the officials said. Most of those with asylum cases currently pending would be recategorized but would lose their status as business or tourism travelers, according to the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the revocations are not final yet.

Since President Donald Trump took office for his second term last year, his administration has steadily ramped up restrictions on visa applicants — demanding more information about their social media histories, requiring the posting of expensive bonds for the processing of visas, and outright banning the issuance of visas to citizens of certain countries.

In a social media post on Monday, Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau called out people who he said try to use tourist and business visas to get into the United States and then apply for asylum.

“People in the US and all over the world are fed up with bogus asylum claims,” Landau wrote on X. “Asylum isn’t supposed to be a loophole to circumvent immigration law.” Landau cited the case of a Colombian citizen who came to the U.S. in 2015 on a tourist visa and then applied for asylum.

B1 visas are generally issued for business trips and B2 visas are generally issued for tourism, family visits or medical care. It was not immediately clear from the documents or the officials how many of these visa holders are seeking or have sought asylum in the United States and would be affected by the revocations.

Current applicants for B1 and B2 visas are asked to affirm that they will not apply for asylum in the United States and prove that they intend to return to their home countries.

In the past 18 months, the State Department has revoked about 175,000 visas for people who have been convicted or accused of crimes ranging from drunken driving to rape and robbery, as well as for people who have spoken out publicly against U.S. policies, particularly in the Middle East.

The administration has also moved to crack down on so-called birth tourism, a practice the administration claims is used by foreign pregnant women to come to the United States to give birth so that their child will benefit from birthright citizenship. Trump has tried several times to end birthright citizenship, but those challenges have been rejected by courts, including the Supreme Court.

The State Department documents obtained by the AP suggest screening of current B1 and B2 visa holders began after the State Department received information about asylum requests from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.