The Brief

Our tax money makes our cities function. It funds everything from pothole repair to garbage pickup to firefighting.

So how much money are you personally putting into all these services?

If you’re a resident of Los Angeles, we made a calculator to show you how your property tax dollars were spent on city services this year, based on the city’s spending estimates. And, yes, this matters for renters, too.

Understanding how cities handle their funds — and where your money fits into it — is one of the best ways residents can hold their leaders accountable. That’s especially relevant now as the L.A. city government faces a financial crisis fueled in part by overspending.

How it works

Roughly a third of the city’s general fund (think of it as L.A.’s main checking account used to pay for services, including police, parks and libraries) comes from property taxes. This is the money we’re following with this calculator.

If you’re a homeowner in the city of L.A., you’re paying that tax directly. If you’re a renter, you’re likely helping your landlord pay that tax through your rent. When your landlord’s property taxes go up (or any other costs — maintenance, repairs or insurance), rent prices often follow.

The rest of the city’s revenues come from sales taxes, business taxes, parking tickets and other fees. You’re likely paying some of those, too, but it's harder to pin down how much you’re contributing in a given year.

To keep things simple, we’ll only be tracking property taxes with this tool — but know that your actual total contribution is likely higher.

If you live outside the city of L.A., your breakdown will look different. We don’t yet have detailed calculations for other cities within the county or some of the other government services your money goes to, like school districts or county departments.

If you’d like us to take a closer look at anything, send us a note via the form at the bottom of this story.

How to find out how much property tax you paid this year

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.)

Try the calculator

Input your property tax amount below and see what the breakdown looks like. Read below to get additional background on some of this spending.

More on how the city spends its money

Wondering what kind of discussions city leaders are having over spending?

Much of their attention has been on the budgets for the police and fire departments, which receive the largest share of city funds but have grappled with staffing shortages. Payouts for liability claims have also pushed the city further into its current budget crisis. 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.

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.

Encouraging recruitment is one reason L.A. Mayor Karen Bass in 2023 said she supported salary hikes for officers 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, which means the salary portion of the LAPD budget — and your contribution to it — will continue to rise until the contract is up in 2027.

More reporting:

• 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 hot 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 mayor’s budget proposal for 2025-26 increases the department’s budget to add 227 new positions, an increase of about 6%.

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
• LA mayor and fire chief's public feud: Inside the fallout over January's wildfire

City employee benefits

One of L.A.'s biggest costs is its annual contributions to retirement and pension funds for city employees, which come from the general fund. This year the city paid $1.4 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.

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:

• What happens to LA council members’ pay and benefits when they leave office? 

Homelessness programs

The dollar amount shown in this tool only represents 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 non-violent calls involving unhoused people.

This figure reflects about $70 million of spending on homelessness. The city of L.A. hasn’t yet released comprehensive spending estimates for all homelessness programs for this year, for which it originally budgeted $337 million from the general fund.

The city budgeted another $614 million in homelessness spending 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 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 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 also exploring the possibility of pulling funding for LAHSA. Bass’ budget proposal for the coming fiscal year decreases spending on homelessness by about 5% overall.

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 has remained at $87 million for the past five years despite payouts regularly amounting to double or triple that amount.

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

Sanitation

About 20% of the Bureau of Sanitation’s spending came from the general fund this year. A large portion of the rest came 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. If the rate hikes don’t get approved, the general fund would have to cover about 40% of the department’s expenses in the coming fiscal year, according to the Bureau of Sanitation’s analysis.

More reporting:

• LA trash fees could soon nearly double. Here's what you should know

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 an additional 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 Los Angeles City Light Maintenance — abbreviated as “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 mayor’s budget proposal 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

It’s about the size of a park bench and made of steel and wood. The bench’s arm rests are formed by the letters “L” and “A” in a design that’s unmistakable to any sports fan. But the welder-artist who created it says it’s not a Dodgers bench.

“This is about civic pride, L.A. pride. I made a design statement saying that it has nothing affiliated with the Dodgers,” said Steve Campos.

Campos grew up near Dodger Stadium, raised by parents who were die-hard Dodgers fans. So much, that they named him after Steve Garvey but that legacy doesn’t keep him from confronting how the Dodgers benefitted from the mass displacement of working-class people from Chavez Ravine after World War Two. That’s why he calls it an L.A. Bench, and not a Dodgers Bench.

The logo may be synonymous with the city's beloved baseball team, but the design of the interlocking letters was used by the L.A. Angels minor league baseball team before the Dodgers moved to L.A. in 1958.

“The monogram was here before the Dodgers,” Campos said.

A second-generation welder

Welding is the Campos family business. His father created gates and security bars for windows and doors for L.A. clients. That was the foundation for the work Campos has done for two decades since graduating from Lincoln High School, L.A. Trade Tech College, and enrolling in a summer program at Art Center in Pasadena.

The inspiration for the L.A. Bench came last year while he was playing around in his shop creating versions of the L.A. logo. A friend he hangs with at Echo Park Lake asked Campos to make him a piece of furniture.

“I was trying to figure out what my friend Curly wanted. He liked Dodgers and drinking and getting into fights, so I was like, 'Let me make something with the LA monogram,'” he said.

Welder-artist Steve Campos created whimsical steel sculptures with the LA logo.

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Courtesy Steve Campos

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It didn’t design itself. He said he had to lengthen the legs on the “A” and lean the back of the “L” in order to make the bench functional. In the process, he’s made a piece of furniture with a ubiquitous logo that he’s embedded with his own L.A. pride, as well as city history past and present.

LA civic pride travels to Japan

Campos vacationed in Japan the last week of April and took advantage of the trip to reach out to people who may be interested in the L.A. Bench. He was caught off guard by people’s reaction when he showed them pictures of it.

“They look at it and they go, 'Oh, Ohtani bench,'” he said.

For them, it’s still a bench embedded with pride, he said, but centered around Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani, an icon in his native Japan.

Campos has made four L.A. benches and is selling them fully assembled, he said, for $2,500 each — taking into account his labor and how costly the raw materials have become. For now, he’s offering the metal parts as a package for $500, which requires the buyer to purchase the wood for the seat and the back — an easy process, he said.

While he has no plans to mass produce the L.A. Bench, he does have one goal in mind that shows how hard it is for him to separate L.A. civic pride and the Dodgers.

“I would love to get a couple of them installed at Dodger Stadium,” he said.

The Venice Boardwalk after sunset has generally been a no-go zone for tourists and locals alike, as the beachside bars and restaurants close on the early side and safety is often an issue. Now, a group of artists is out to bring some vibrancy to the creative neighborhood with a series of new installations that will include live evening performances – and even a “Venice Opera House.”

“Let's play with light and let's play with sound and give people a reason to come to the Boardwalk after sundown,” said artist and entrepreneur Stefan Ashkenazy, who is curating the project and owns the buildings housing them. “I mean, let's just be open 24 hours a day.”

The concept doesn’t have an official name yet, but he’s been calling it “See World.”

Artist James Ostrer's space looks out from a bed through the fence to the ocean at Venice Beach.

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Laura Hertzfeld

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LAist

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William Attaway, a longtime Venice artist, created a gallery space filled with various paintings and sculptures.

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Laura Hertzfeld

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LAist

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The pair of modern buildings on the Venice Boardwalk at Thornton Ave. – with their big balconies, floor-to-ceiling glass windows, and seven open garage-style retail spaces – have sat mostly empty since Snapchat vacated their beachside offices in 2019. Ashkenazy recently bought the building and recruited artists to fill those front-facing spaces with creative work until a full-time tenant comes in.

Over the past several weeks the installations have been created in real-time, in public.

All of the projects are loosely along the theme of “home,” with each artist claiming a “room” in the two buildings that stretch across a full block on the Boardwalk. Several local Venice artists are featured, including William Attaway, whose intricate mosaic work is recognizable on the Venice public restrooms along the beach. Attaway’s space features a floating larger-than-life-sized statue and various works in a mini-gallery. In the next room is Robin Murez’s pieces, featuring carved wooden seats from her beloved neighborhood Venice Flying Carousel.

Ashkenazy is no stranger to wild (and wildly successful) art ideas. He’s the owner of the Petit Ermitage hotel in West Hollywood, a longtime haven for visiting artists, and the founder of the decade-old Bombay Beach Biennale, where artists install all kinds of work in an annual event near the Salton Sea. Many of the artists from that community are featured at the Venice project.

A "Venice Opera House" will host pop-up music events throughout the summer.

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Laura Hertfeldz

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LAist

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New York-based artist Greg Haberny's paintings on the wall of his Venice space.

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Laura Hertzfeld

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New York-based artist Greg Haberny and London-based artist James Ostrer have brought some of their work in the Bombay Beach Biennale to the Venice project. Their windows on the Boardwalk both speak to a child-like sense of wonder and creativity.

“I think it's just kind of exploring and playing a little bit, to have the freedom to be able to do that,” Haberny says of his imagined child’s bedroom space, which includes a fort made out of puffy cheese balls. “It's a big space, too.
It's beautiful.”

Ostrer is experimenting with a performance art idea where he sits in bed amongst a room full of his own artwork, which he describes as “happy art with an edge.” Looking out at the ocean from the bed, he’s invited passersby to sit and have chats with him about his work or anything else they want to talk about.

“It’s a very intimate space, so you have a different kind of conversation,” he said. “I use art to channel human creativity, and [talk about] dark things.”

While there are open fences that block off the spaces, they aren’t sealed up at night. Both Ashkenazy and the team of artists seemed open to the idea that anything could happen and that the installations are a conversation with the public – and with that comes some risk.

Greg Haberny (right) works with his assistants on an installation featuring kid-inspired graffiti art and a "cheesy puff" fort.

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Laura Hertzfeld

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“I don't really know if I [would] say worried, but I guess it's just the cost of doing business,” Haberny said. “I don't really make things to get damaged or broken, sure. But I have done [things like] burned all my paintings and then made paint out of ash.”

While he’s felt safe – and even slept overnight in the installation – Ostrer has been collaborating with a local female artist who performs in a pig mask in front of his installation some nights. Watching her perform, he said, has taught him about the vulnerability of women in public spaces like the Boardwalk. “I've started to, on a very fractional level, have seen how scary that is. Because I've sat in the bed behind her performing at the front here… the way in which men are approaching her and shrieking at her … it's shocking.”

Ashkenazy says he will keep the artists in the space, potentially rotating new ones in, until a fulltime tenant takes over.

“This is an experiment … and after acquiring the building, the intention wasn't, ‘let's open a bunch of public art spaces,’ he said. “It is kind of …what the building wanted and listening to what the Boardwalk needed. Let's play, let's have the artists that we love and appreciate have a space to play and engage and give the locals and the visitors to the Boardwalk something to experience.”

A new trail across the beloved natural area of Elephant Hill in Northeast Los Angeles is officially opening this weekend.

The route is years in the making, and it's a big milestone in the decades-long conservation efforts to preserve this local jewel in the community of El Sereno.

The hiking trail connects one side of Elephant Hill to the other — from the corner of Pullman Street and Harriman Avenue all the way across to Lathrop Street.

It's 0.75 miles in total, but packs a punch.

"It's a pretty straight shot, but because of the terrain — the trail is kind of twisty and curvy. There's switchbacks — and great views," Elva Yañez, board president of the nonprofit Save Elephant Hill, said.

People have always been able to access the 110-acre green space, but Yañez said the new trail provides a safe and easy way to navigate the steep hillsides.

The El Sereno nonprofit has been working for two decades to preserve the land. Illegal dumping and off-roading have damaged the open space over the years. And the majority of the 110 acres are privately owned by an estimated 200 individual owners.

Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority (MRCA) joined the efforts in 2018, spurred by a $700,000 grant from Los Angeles County Regional Park and Open Space District, in part, to build the trail. The local agency received some $2 million in grants from the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy to add to the 10 acres of Elephant Hill it manages and conserves. This year, MCRA acquired an additional 12 parcels — or about 2.4 acres.

And the spiffy new footpath — with trail signage, information kiosks and landscape boulders — is not just a long-sought-for victory but a beginning in a sense.

"We know that it means a lot to the community," Sarah Kevorkian, who oversees the trail project for MRCA, said. "We're wrapping up the trail, but it really feels like the beginning of all that is to come."

A hint of that vision already exists — for hikers traversing the new route, courtesy of Test Plot, the L.A.-based nonprofit that works to revitalize depleted lands.

"They're able to see at the end of the trail, at the 'test plot' — exactly what a restored Elephant Hill would look like," Yañez said.

Here's a preview:

A coalition of residents from across the San Gabriel Valley are mobilizing over a battery storage project and possibly more industrial development in the City of Industry they say could pollute communities next door.

A protest is scheduled today in neighboring Rowland Heights, targeting a 400-megawatt battery energy storage facility sited on about 9 acres that was approved by the City of Industry leaders in January.

Such Battery Energy Storage Systems, or BESS, are used to keep the power grid stable, especially as output from renewable energy sources like solar and wind fluctuate. But fires involving lithium batteries at some sites have heightened environmental and public health fears.

Because of the City of Industry’s unusual, sprawling shape stretching along the 60 Freeway, it borders on more than a dozen communities, meaning what happens there can have far-reaching impact.

“Pollution does not end right at the border,” said Andrew Yip, an organizer with No Data Centers SGV Coalition. “Pollution travels.”

Some local activists with the Puente Hills Community Preservation Association have challenged the approval of the battery facility under the California Environmental Quality Act.

Beyond environmental concerns, locals have also been frustrated with how decisions are made by officials in the City of Industry, a municipality that’s almost entirely zoned for industrial use and has less than 300 residents.

Organizers say they’ve struggled to get direct responses from city officials whom they say have replaced regular meetings with special meetings, which under state law require less advance notice.

A city spokesperson has not responded to requests for comment.

The so-called Marici Energy Storage System Facility would be run by Aypa Power. The fact that the battery storage developer is owned by the private equity giant Blackstone, a major investor in AI and data centers, has only fueled concerns that a battery storage facility would lay the groundwork for data center development.

A request for comment from Aypa was not returned.

Today’s protest is taking place at Peter F. Schabarum Regional Park in Rowland Heights across the street from the Puente Hills Mall, a largely vacant “dead” mall, which activists fear could be redeveloped into a data center and bring higher utility costs and greater air and noise pollution.

Yip pointed out that industrial developments make a lot of money for the City of Industry.

“But none of these surrounding communities receive any of those benefits,” Yip said. “Yet we have to put up with all the harmful effects and impacts from this city that does all this development without really reaching out.”