The Brief

L.A. Mayor Karen Bass and the City Council approved a $14 billion spending plan for the upcoming fiscal year, which starts in July and runs through June 2026. It eliminates hundreds of city jobs and reduces spending across a large swath of city departments, though it shifts some of the cuts Bass originally proposed in April.

L.A. residents foot this bill through a combination of property taxes, sales taxes, utility taxes, permit fees, parking tickets and more. Property taxes are the biggest share of the city’s revenue, making up 20% of the general fund that’s used to pay for most services — homeowners and renters contribute to this, since renters likely help their landlords pay this tax through their rent.

The taxes you pay to the city aren’t going down. What’s changing is how they’re being spent, and what kind of services you’re getting in return.

Try our calculator below to find out how much you’re personally contributing to fund city services this year, and how it compares to how your money was spent last year. It’ll give you an approximation of how your property tax dollars get allocated according to the city’s budget.

How it works

Put the amount of property tax you pay each year into the calculator to see your results. It’s not a complete estimate of how much you pay for city services, since it doesn’t factor in contributions like sales taxes or parking meter fees, but it’s the simplest way to get an idea of what your receipt looks like. Know that your actual total contribution is likely higher than what this calculator shows.

The median property tax bill in L.A. is $5,438 per year, according to the Tax Foundation. When in doubt, use this number in the calculator.

To get a more precise figure, you can look up a property tax bill by address with the following steps:

1. Type in your address on the L.A. County Assessor’s website and find the 10-digit Assessor’s Identification Number, or AIN.
2. Enter the AIN here (no dashes) to pull up the most recent property tax bill.
3. Find the number on the top right that corresponds with General Tax Levy. This is the portion that goes to city and county general funds. Use this number in our calculator below. If you’re in a large apartment building, this number is going to be pretty big. You can divide it by the number of units in your building to estimate your contribution.

More on how the city spends its money

Wondering what discussions led to some of these budget decisions?

The $1 billion deficit the city faces this year comes after the devastation of the Palisades Fire, expected cuts in federal funding and soaring payouts for liability claims.

The L.A. Police Department has been a major focal point of the City Council’s budget discussions, as it receives the largest share of city funds but struggles to hire its target number of sworn officers. Bass also faced scrutiny over funding for the L.A. Fire Department after its former chief publicly criticized funding cuts in the wake of the Palisades Fire. Liability payouts have climbed year after year, reaching more than $300 million this year. Meanwhile, departments like the Bureau of Sanitation and Bureau of Street Lighting are proposing raising other fees to fund their services as city finances get tighter.

Here’s more context behind some of these figures along with LAist’s recent reporting on city department budgets.

About 280 civilian LAPD jobs will be eliminated in the new budget.

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Police

The Police Department receives more city funding than any other department. More than 95% of its budget comes from the general fund.

The number of sworn police officers has been falling in recent years. Today there are about 8,700 sworn officers, down from roughly 10,000 before the COVID-19 pandemic.

During the 2025 budget negotiation process, Bass clashed with the City Council over how much funding to allocate for hiring new recruits. Ultimately, the 2025-26 plan allows for hiring an additional 240 new officers, and the City Council agreed to find funding to hire an additional 240. The plan keeps the current number of sworn officers stable when accounting for employee attrition.

About 280 civilian jobs will be eliminated, including specialists who analyze DNA evidence.

Although the number of sworn officers has declined, their pay has gone up. In an effort to boost recruitment, Bass in 2023 supported officer salary hikes worth $1 billion over four years, a deal the L.A. City Council approved. The raises are guaranteed under a contract with the police officers’ union that expires in 2027.

More reporting:

• LA City Council saves 1,000 jobs in revised budget; plan reduces LAPD staffing
• McDonnell confirmed as new LAPD chief, says he won't cooperate with ICE
• LA City Council approves major police salary hike

Fire

The Fire Department’s budget has been a topic of conversation since the Palisades Fire erupted in January. (The LAFD was not in charge of fighting the Eaton Fire, which burned the unincorporated area of Altadena. That was managed by the L.A. County Fire Department.) This department’s budget comes almost entirely from the general fund, with less than 1% coming from a half-cent sales tax all Californians pay for local public safety agencies.

Before the fires broke out, then-L.A. Fire Chief Kristin Crowley had warned that the department was understaffed and that emergency services were suffering. With just under one firefighter per 1,000 residents, the LAFD is among the smallest fire departments per capita of any major city. Response times have also increased in recent years as the city’s population has grown.

The L.A. City Council approved a labor contract in 2024 that boosted firefighter pay and funded new equipment, but Crowley said that wasn’t enough to address understaffing.

The adopted budget for 2025-26 increases the department’s budget to add 58 new positions and purchase new fire trucks. However, District 11 Councilmember Traci Park, one of three council members who voted against the budget, said it still wasn’t enough to meet the department’s day-to-day needs.

More reporting:

• Before the latest firestorm, LA had been warned that its Fire Department is too small
• LA faces $9.5M payout for unpaid firefighter OT — on top of $1.2 billion already spent
• Imperfect Paradise: The fallout over LAFD funding: Bass vs. Crowley
• LA City Council saves 1,000 jobs in revised budget; plan reduces LAPD staffing

City employee benefits

One of L.A.’s biggest costs is its annual contribution to retirement and pension funds for city employees, which come from the general fund. For the fiscal year ending this June, the city paid $1.42 billion — about 17.9% of the general fund — to cover those payments, plus some short-term borrowing costs to cover cash flow gaps. Sworn police and fire employees receive the biggest portion of these pension funds. That funding level remains roughly flat in the upcoming fiscal year’s budget, even accounting for impending job cuts.

In 2024, L.A. city voters passed Measure FF, which raised the overall cost of pensions. It allowed about 460 park rangers, port police and other peace officers the option to move from the civilian pension system to the more generous plan reserved for fire and police officers. An analysis from the city administrative officer said the measure would cost the general fund a $23 million one-time payment and about $1 million annually.

When the stock market performs poorly, the city has to contribute more of your tax money to pension funds to make sure pension recipients get what they’re owed. That’s one of many ways the national economic outlook will have a big impact on L.A.’s finances in the years to come.

More reporting:

• Voters shape the L.A. city budget too — here’s how

Homelessness programs

The dollar amount shown in this calculator represents only a few of the city’s services for unhoused people that aren’t part of other departments’ costs, including Inside Safe, Bass’ initiative to move thousands of unhoused Angelenos to temporary hotels and motels while they await permanent housing, and CIRCLE, a crisis response program that sends mental health workers to respond to nonviolent calls involving unhoused people.

This figure for the 2025-26 fiscal year reflects about $41 million of projected spending on homelessness out of about $350 million budgeted for homeless services from city funds.

The homelessness spending not reflected here also includes city department funds for homelessness-specific services — for example, job support programs for unhoused people through the Economic and Workforce Development Department’s budget, or park encampment cleanup resources through the Recreation and Parks Department’s budget.

The city budgeted another $602 million in homelessness spending this upcoming year to come from state and federal grants as well as taxes or bonds that L.A. city voters passed. (That’s Measure ULA, which sets aside 4% of L.A. city property sales of more than $5 million and allocates them to homeless services, and Proposition HHH, which authorized the city to borrow $1.2 billion to build 10,000 units of housing over a decade.)

The city also contributes money to the joint city-county agency Los Angeles Housing Services Authority, or LAHSA, for its services including the annual Homeless Count, street outreach and case managers for placing unhoused people into available housing. L.A. County lawmakers recently voted to withdraw its funding for LAHSA and create a new county-run agency. L.A. City Council members are exploring the possibility of pulling funding for LAHSA as well. This year’s signed budget for the coming fiscal year slightly increases spending on homelessness by 0.2%.

More reporting:

• LA City Council votes to explore pulling its funding from beleaguered homelessness agency
• LA County to strip hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars from homelessness agency
• Judge blasts LA homeless spending as a ‘train wreck’ and threatens to seize control
• Will an LA program that diverts mental health calls to clinicians instead of police continue?
• Study finds LA would have more affordable housing if ‘mansion tax’ did not apply to new apartments
• Fraud investigation launched into homeless service provider for LA’s Inside Safe program

Liability claims

This year, the city of L.A. is expected to pay more than $300 million to settle claims and lawsuits against the city for wrongdoing. It’s more than triple the amount the city budgeted for liability claims.

That budget remained at $87 million for the past five years despite payouts regularly amounting to double or triple that amount. The budget for the upcoming fiscal year ends that trend, raising the budget to $187 million — more than double that of the previous year, but still not near the $300 million expected to be spent this year.

Some of the most expensive settlements include claims over housing discrimination, police use of force and injuries caused by decaying city infrastructure.

More reporting:

• As LA veers toward a financial crisis, $320M in liability payouts play a big role
• LA is on the hook for more than half a billion in liability payouts in just 2 years. 4 of the costliest cases

L.A. residents will see their trash fees rise in coming years.

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Sanitation

Only about 13% of the Bureau of Sanitation’s funding comes from the general fund in the upcoming budget. A large portion of the rest comes from fees that residents pay for trash, recycling, water usage and other services.

The department has been facing staffing shortages and budget gaps, which is why earlier this year it asked the L.A. City Council to raise trash collection fees. The rate increase was approved, and customers will see trash rates rise through 2029.

More reporting:

• LA trash fees could soon nearly double. Here's what you should know 
• There are nearly 10,000 vacant city jobs in LA. What's causing the shortfall?

Street lighting

If the figure shown in this calculator seems small, that’s because it’s not the full amount we actually pay for street lighting services.

Most of this department’s budget comes from a property tax that’s specifically for street lighting. If you pull up your property tax bill (see instructions near the top of this story), you’ll see a section called “Direct Assessments.” Underneath that is a line for “City Lt Maint” — that’s most of what you’re contributing to this department’s services.

This fee hasn’t increased since the late 1990s. That has put stress on the department’s budget, which is also seeing rising costs due to copper wire thefts and frequent outages.

Last year’s budget eliminated about 17% of positions from the Bureau of Street Lighting, which were vacant at the time. The adopted budget for 2025-26 cuts it by another 7%.

More reporting:

• LA has a backlog of complaints about streetlight outages. Why haven't they been fixed?
• Copper wire thefts leave LA neighborhoods in the dark. Here’s what officials are doing to try to stop it
• With broken streetlight complaints on the rise in LA — 46K last year alone — lag on repairs keeps growing

Saying he had concerns it could disenfranchise voters during the midterm election, a federal judge on Tuesday seemed skeptical of the Trump administration’s demands that California election officials set aside 20,000 ballots that it claimed could have been mailed to noncitizens.

“Some of these may be very valid voters, and that’s my concern about disenfranchisement,” said U.S. District Judge David O. Carter, an appointee of President Bill Clinton.

Carter said he would issue a formal ruling by Wednesday, but he told the courtroom he was likely going to appoint a special master to weigh the evidence both sides present at a hearing in two weeks. That means his final ruling might not come until after the election.

He said he didn’t want to “just wing it with a ruling” based on last-minute evidence the federal government submitted to the court the night before Tuesday’s hearing.

Carter also suggested that his ruling would order federal authorities to stop telling election officials that they could face criminal charges if they didn’t comply with the Trump administration’s demands. The Trump administration on Friday sent letters to California election officials telling them to set aside ballots from suspected noncitizens, and threatened them with criminal charges if they allowed those people to vote.

“This court believes it would be wise that any threats to state or county (election) employees cease immediately,” Carter told the courtroom.

Carter’s remarks point to yet another likely legal blow to the Trump administration as it seeks to validate President Donald Trump’s longstanding claims of widespread election fraud favoring Democrats. Experts and election officials say those claims are meritless.

Bill Essayli, the first assistant U.S. attorney in Los Angeles, acknowledged that the government’s list of 20,000 people may contain citizens, but he said the possibility that noncitizens were voting illegally was too great a threat.

“I would ask the state how many illegal votes is OK for them?” Essayli said. “It cannot be that the state has a right to facilitate the counting and tabulation of noncitizen votes. There’s no right to that.”

The Trump administration sued California earlier this month saying election officials refused to comply with a 48-hour federal deadline to set aside the ballots of up to 20,000 people the administration had flagged as possible noncitizens until the voters’ citizenship could be verified.

The administration sought a temporary restraining order forcing the state to comply.

California officials argued there was no way they could since they were busy overseeing the election. They also called the demand an illegal effort to meddle in state-run elections that could disenfranchise legal voters.

“I just want to make sure the stakes are clear: that what we’re talking about is stripping voting rights from thousands of people until proven otherwise,” said Anne Bellows, a deputy attorney general with the California Department of Justice.

Judge points to immigrant arrests

State and county officials also have questioned the methodology the federal government used to flag possible noncitizens.

In a court filing, Los Angeles County officials said that a sampling of 200 names from the federal list, which included people from all over California, found that many of them were likely citizens and that most had not voted before and were not sent ballots. Federal investigators re-reviewed those 200 names and found that only four were citizens, Essayli told the judge.

“We stand by the reliability of the information,” he said. “We take our obligations and ethics very seriously.”

Carter noted that, last week, federal prosecutors charged 28 California green card holders for allegedly voting or registering to vote in violation of laws prohibiting noncitizens from participating in elections.

He said that if noncitizens really are voting in as large of numbers as the Trump administration claims, there’s nothing stopping federal prosecutors from finding them and charging them without the risk of blocking legal voters from having their ballots counted.

“If it’s this big, you’ve got a remedy for goodness sakes,” Carter told Essayli. “Go out and indict.”

After the hearing, Essayli said from the courthouse steps that the state could “resolve this today.”

“They just seem disinterested in getting to the bottom of this,” Essayli said, noting that the number of ballots in question could tip smaller elections. “A lot of elections are decided by tens of votes or hundreds of votes."

9th Circuit ruled against Trump

The hearing came a day after two judges on a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected an emergency effort from the Trump administration to bypass Carter’s courtroom.

The Trump administration sought an emergency order from the appellate court, claiming that Carter didn’t schedule a hearing fast enough. The two judges said prosecutors’ arguments about urgency didn’t hold up.

Their ruling noted that the prosecutors have been making claims about illegal voters on California’s voter rolls since July and could have taken action any time since, so their “claimed emergency, at least in part, is a self-constructed one.”

Judge Mark Bennett, a Trump appointee, noted in a concurring opinion that he had “serious doubts” about the federal government’s claims that prosecutors could “superintend or intervene in a state’s election administration.”

He wrote that Congress granted states — not the executive branch — authority over elections.

In a dissenting opinion, Judge Patrick Bumatay, another Trump appointee, argued that “federal law precludes California from commingling ballots likely cast by aliens with legitimate ballots, because it encourages and induces illegal voting.”

“Stopping that practice for those identified as likely noncitizens is the bare minimum,” Bumatay wrote.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

The Los Angeles City Council gave the L.A. Police Department the green light Tuesday to move forward with a pilot program to install new automated license plate recognition cameras in the city, despite concerns from council members and the public about privacy and surveillance.

The council voted 9-6 to veto the program, but fell short of the 10 votes required to nix the agreement and send it back to the Board of Police Commissioners.

Under the pilot program, security company Axon Enterprise will install cameras on some city streetlights for a three-month trial period, at no cost to the city.

The narrow vote divided the council, which debated at length whether L.A. should move forward with introducing more license plate readers on its streets without additional requirements on how the police use the data.

This summer, LAPD declined to renew its contract with Flock Safety for license plate readers after reports that law enforcement agencies including LAPD had shared Flock data with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection. Across California, the use of AI license plate readers has faced pushback from community members concerned about how the information is used.

The L.A. City Council voted 9 - 6 to veto the program and fell short of the ten votes required to nix the agreement.

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“I certainly understand the department's desire to bring on a new company to replace Flock, but in the neighborhoods that I represent, there still seems to be a lot of uncertainty about how this new technology will work,” said Councilmember Curren Price, who voted to veto the pilot program.

Council members who blocked the veto cited public safety concerns, saying there were other ways to require the police to increase transparency. Councilmember Traci Park said that outrage over the technology stemmed from misinformation.

Councilmember Bob Blumenfield, who also voted against rejecting the pilot program, said the council’s power to negotiate tighter regulations on how LAPD uses license plate reader data could come later on, after the three-month testing period.

“The point of leverage is going to come after the three months, he said. “That's when we're going to be faced with this question about ‘Do we expand this?’”

How we got here

The City Council weighing in on an LAPD pilot program is not the norm, and comes after months of heightened scrutiny over how the department utilizes automatic license plate reader data. The department primarily uses the technology in its vehicles rather than on city streets.

In July, the Office of the Inspector General for the L.A. Board of Police Commissioners issued a lengthy report on the status of the technology within LAPD, and recommended the department get approval for new contracts from the Board of Police Commissioners, a civilian body appointed by the mayor that determines policy for the department.

That’s what led the board to consider and approve the Axon pilot program in September. That opened up an opportunity for the L.A. City Council to intervene in the decision. Under the city charter, the council can veto actions by boards of commissioners with a two-thirds vote.

That’s what Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martinez was pushing for when he initiated the council vote. He said Tuesday that the vote was an opportunity to push the police department to commit to independent auditing of how it uses automated license plate reader data, establish board oversight of sharing data with external agencies and limit who in the department can access the data.

“We should take time to make sure that we have thorough, thoughtful protections laid out before we install more cameras,” Soto-Martinez said Tuesday.

The pilot program is just a small slice of LAPD’s business with Axon. The Board of Police Commissioners also recently approved a 10-year, $235 million contract with the company for body cameras, tasers and automated license plate recognition cameras for around 1,600 police vehicles.

That contract will require council approval and is currently being reviewed by the city administrative officer, according to the mayor’s office.

Record-breaking high tides rolled into Southern California waters for the second day in a row Tuesday.

The tide gauge in San Pedro read 8.18 feet Tuesday morning, its highest measurement since records began more than a century ago, after already setting a new record on Monday. The previous record of 7.93 feet was set in 2005.

Records were also broken at tide gauges in La Jolla and Santa Barbara.

High water levels spilled over seawalls and swept across beaches, inundating communities along L.A. and Orange County coasts that have been hit repeatedly by storm surges and destructive surf over the last few months.

“We've already seen impacts that we have not had in quite some time,” said Lisa Phillips, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service. 

The exceptionally high tides were expected to peak Tuesday and slowly subside as the week progresses. Coastal flood warnings are in effect up and down the coast until Thursday afternoon.

But scientists say the conditions are just a preview of what’s to come in the next few months with the highest astronomical tides of the year — and peak El Niño season — still on the horizon.

Coastal flooding

On the Balboa Peninsula in Newport Beach on Monday, water poured over the seawalls of some homes that back up to Newport Harbor, leaving up to a foot of flooding in some intersections.

At the corner of 39th Street and River Avenue, Diane Teitscheid waded ankle-deep, motioning for cars to slow down so as not to slosh the water into her and her neighbors’ garages.

“All the water on our entire street is coming from that house,” she said, pointing to a home where water rushed through the side gates.

The city urged residents to prepare for the high tides, knocking on doors and offering free sandbags at multiple locations. Some did not heed the warning.

“What we're finding is there's just some private residents that are choosing to do nothing,” said Joe Stapleton, the Newport Beach City Council member whose district includes the Balboa Peninsula. “And by doing nothing, they're intentionally flooding streets and neighbors' properties.”

Stapleton said the city is now planning to take “more of an enforcement approach,” which could include fines for people who refuse to bolster their seawalls with sandbags in flood-prone areas.

Several Newport Beach homes were inundated by seawater on Monday.

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Tide levels in some parts of Southern California set records Monday, when this photo was taken on Newport Beach's Balboa Peninsula, and again the following day.

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Flooding also prompted officials to shut down part of Pacific Coast Highway in Huntington Beach.

Farther north, seawater inundated streets and homes on the Long Beach Peninsula, where a number of structures along the boardwalk have been rendered uninhabitable by recent storm surges from Hurricane Marie and Tropical Storm Rachel.

What’s pushing the tides over the top?

Tides are naturally high during this time of year because of the position of the moon and sun.

But at the moment, other factors are driving up sea levels and pushing astronomical tides even higher than they would normally be.

First, the ocean off the coast of Southern California is warmer than ever recorded — we’re nearly a year and a half into a prolonged marine heat wave. Since warmer water takes up more space than colder water, sea levels are higher. Water temperatures across the Central Coast and Southern California are 5 to 9 degrees above average.

Roads and homes near 38th Street Park on Newport Beach's Balboa Peninsula flooded Monday.

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Scientists say the warming is being driven by a combination of human-caused climate change and El Niño, a climate pattern in which the normally cooler eastern Pacific Ocean heats up.

Second, El Niño has pushed a Kelvin wave into Southern California waters. What’s a Kelvin wave? It’s essentially a huge mass of warm water moving across the ocean. When a Kelvin wave collides with a landmass, it can raise sea levels up to a foot.

University of California climate scientist Daniel Swain also said the current tidal conditions are just the beginning of even more severe high tides over the next several months. That means more flooding for coastal communities.

“We have not seen the worst coastal flooding this year that we're likely to see later,” Swain said. “This is probably, unfortunately for those who are dealing with it, just a preview of what is to come. The coastal flooding will be more widespread geographically and probably significantly deeper later this season.”

Swain said king tides — the term for tides at their yearly peak — have yet to arrive. Tides generally don’t reach their highest until late November, December and January.

On top of that, Southern California will likely see continued sea level rise from El Niño-driven Kelvin waves over the next few months. And this year’s potentially historic El Niño season is also likely to come with significant rain, potentially adding storm surge and surf.

Drive around Newport Beach this election season, and you’re likely to see lawn signs with an image of four giant concrete bunnies behind bars below the phrase “SAVE OUR PARK.” It’s a reference to the current City Council’s controversial idea of building a new police headquarters and jail on the parkland that surrounds the Newport Beach Civic Center, home to the famous, or infamous, “Bunnyhenge” sculpture.

The proposal, one of several the city is considering for a new police headquarters, wouldn’t actually lead to the sculpture’s demise, but the idea of paving over a significant portion of the open space and paths around the sculpture has emerged as a top issue in the city’s November City Council race. Other major issues include protecting the city’s vulnerable shoreline from El Niño and preventing the kind of chaos that engulfed the Balboa Peninsula on July 4, when looting, illegal fireworks and street brawls broke out, leading to hundreds of arrests.

Three seats on the seven-member council are contested (in a fourth seat, Robyn Grant, the incumbent has no challengers). Two challengers, Walter Stahr and Andy Gerken, entered the race in their respective districts specifically to fight against building a new police station in the park, which would include the city jail.

“I am 100% opposed to a jail in the park. That is my number one issue,” Stahr said at a candidate forum in September.

Walter Stahr, a candidate for Newport Beach Civic Council District 3, jumped into the race out of concern for the proposal to build a new police headquarters in Civic Center Park.

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At the same forum, Gerken said, “I imagined a police department there and the park gone, and I thought, ‘How could I not run?’ So I ran to save the park.”

The issue illustrates a classic Southern California debate, and one that gains increasing urgency as developable land grows ever more scarce — how valuable is open space?

Everyone agrees Newport PD needs new digs. But where? 

Newport’s current police headquarters, off Jamboree Road, is more than 50 years old. The force has outgrown the building, and it is plagued by maintenance problems. “It’s routine that we have sewage backup; we had the electrical fire last month, the power outage with the failure of the backup generator in November,” Dave Miner, the police chief, said at a city meeting in March. “We definitely do need a new building.”

Neither the City Council members nor the candidates running to unseat them dispute the need. The question is where.

A series of ad hoc committees has looked into several options:

• Rebuild the headquarters in its current spot
• Build on a city-owned site near John Wayne Airport, which was purchased years earlier with a potential police headquarters in mind
• Purchase private land for the new headquarters
• Convert a portion of Civic Center Park, right across from City Hall, which would mean razing some of the sculpture garden that includes Bunnyhenge
  

Concept designs show the police station taking up to one-quarter of the existing parkland on a slope that would put it right under the watchful gaze of the giant concrete rabbits of Bunnyhenge.

Earlier this year, when the majority of City Council members seemed to favor the park option, opponents sprang into action. Dozens of people showed up to a City Council meeting in March to speak against the idea, including Stahr. He is challenging incumbent Erik Weigand in District 3 along with another challenger, Tim Stoaks.

“Parks are sacred spaces,” Stahr said from the lectern at that meeting. “One does not destroy a park to make way for an office building, because, face it, that’s what the police station really is: it’s an office building and a parking structure and a huge gas station.”

Up to a quarter of Newport Beach Civic Center Park, and up to about half of the lower part of the park, could be razed to build a new police headquarters.

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Supporters say putting the new police station on city property makes financial sense and would consolidate the city’s main services at the Civic Center.

No decision has been made to build the new headquarters on the parkland. But the city has allocated at least $1.5 million dollars to evaluate the option.

Once maligned, Bunnyhenge hopped into locals’ hearts

The controversy over potentially putting a new police station in the park has echoes in Newport Beach history. In the early aughts, the city was desperate to replace its outgrown City Hall. One controversial option was to build it on part of the land, the same slender parcel at issue now, that residents had been promised as their own coastal version of a Central Park.

Residents put the idea on the ballot in 2008, and after a whopping $800,000 in spending for and against the measure (the equivalent of about $1.2 million today), voters approved the new Civic Center.

One of the walking paths that would likely have to be rerouted or eliminated if a new police headquarters is built in Civic Center Park.

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The park was developed along with the Civic Center, including the sculpture garden where Bunnyhenge sits. It also includes wetlands, walking paths through native coastal vegetation and a dog park.

The quirky installation of giant rabbits at the park has spawned love and ire over the years. Families take their holiday pictures with the concrete beasts, and they’ve become a destination for out-of-town visitors thanks, at least in part, to their inclusion in the popular Atlas Obscura travel guide.

But some, including former City Councilmember Scott Peotter, thought the bunnies were a waste of money. In a 2014 campaign video, Peotter criticized city officials for spending money on the installation. At the end of the video, Peotter walks away while one giant bunny’s heads spontaneously explodes. (It wasn’t real, and the bunnies still stand.)

Park lovers say a new police station would not only intrude on the sculptured bunnies’ territory, but the project would also eliminate walking paths, jeopardize the adjacent wetlands and reduce habitat for the real bunnies and other animals that live in the park.

What do the candidates say about building a police station in the park?

At a forum held in late September at the OASIS Senior Center, City Council candidates were asked which site is most appropriate for a future police station and why. The two challengers running on the issue, Stahr and Gerken, were unequivocal about where it should not be located.

“Definitely not the Civic Center Park,” Gerken said, adding that he would consider the police department’s preferences regarding the other options.

Stahr said, “I don't know the precise place it should be. The one thing I am absolutely morally convinced of is that it does not belong in the park.”

The other two challengers, Stoaks and Tina Babajanians, also said they opposed the idea.

In contrast, incumbents Weigand, Lauren Kleiman and Joe Stapleton didn’t rule out the possibility. “What I will agree with a lot of people in the community is this process has been flawed from the beginning,” Stapleton said, noting that he would have favored a “more public-facing committee” rather than the initial ad hoc committee, which had no public members.

Kleiman, who is facing a challenge from Gerken to represent District 6, said she supports building a new station “anywhere that is central and that allows the police to have continued operation … that would not impact safety in the city.” She said ideally the new HQ would get built where the current one sits, but doing so would be logistically challenging and disrupt police operations.

Weigand, who is facing a challenge from Stahr and Stoaks to represent District 3, said he was “OK with studying the Civic Center site … to figure out if it actually works.” If it turns out it's not feasible, he said, the city should look at nearby properties that would put the new HQ in “the heart of our city.”

After the candidate forum, resident Pamela Marks said her top issue is making sure the police station doesn’t get built in the park. But more than the idea itself, she said, she doesn’t think the current City Council has listened to residents’ concerns about the proposal. “I get that feeling when I go to the meetings. They kinda roll their eyes and, you know, they just blow it off,” she said.

Asked why preserving Civic Center Park is important to her, Marks said, “The park's important to me because open space is important to me.” She said she volunteers for the Wetlands and Wildlife Care Center in neighboring Huntington Beach. “I've released wildlife in that park because that's where it was found.”