The Brief

Frustration came through loud and clear as legislators hurled question after question at the head of the state’s homelessness interagency council: Why, after years of planning and billions of dollars invested, is there so little to show for the effort?

“You come into a budget committee and there’s no numbers,” Assemblymember Phil Ting, a San Francisco Democrat, said at the May 6 Assembly committee hearing. “Why is it taking so long?”

Assemblymember Vince Fong, a Bakersfield Republican, took issue with the council saying it needed more money to compile the data. And Chris Ward, a Democrat from San Diego, said he’d been asking the same questions since 2022: “The fact that we’re still now, three years later here as a state is incredibly frustrating because that guides our decision making here as a budget.”

But even without a full picture of how well the homelessness spending is working, Gov. Gavin Newsom is proposing cuts to cover the state’s budget deficit.

That’s just one example of how the state budget gets put together, often without fully knowing if a program is paying off. Revenue dictates decisions, and voter-passed initiatives direct some spending. After that, legislators use any data that’s available, but they also negotiate with other officials and listen to their constituents.

They’re also lobbied by advocates and interest groups. (More than 650 organizations spent money lobbying on the budget, as well as other issues.)

For the 2024-25 budget now before the Legislature, Newsom released a revised plan earlier this month that calls for dipping into reserves, canceling some new spending and cutting existing programs to cover a remaining shortfall of $27.6 billion. The independent Legislative Analyst’s Office, which assesses the budget picture through different calculations, cites the deficit as $55 billion, though it generally agrees with Newsom’s overall view of the state’s finances.

Today and through this week, the Assembly and Senate will conduct hearings on Newsom’s proposals. The Legislature faces a June 15 deadline to approve its version.

Jesse Gabriel, who leads the Assembly budget committee, noted that only a handful of legislators have dealt with a deep deficit before. The state had a record budget surplus as recently as two years ago, thanks to federal pandemic aid and a roaring stock market; the last lengthy recession ended in 2009.

“This is a new experience for a lot of people,” the Democrat from Encino told CalMatters. “I think we’re going to have to work really hard together to get on the same page and do the best we can in a really difficult situation.”

State bases money needs on prior year 

Addressing California’s deficit is a two-part equation, where increasing revenue could help. But Newsom has ruled out increasing taxes and instead emphasized “right-sizing expenditures,” telling legislators they shouldn’t expect bills with high price tags to pass.

For Gabriel, the May 6 hearing by the revamped accountability and oversight committee hints at an appetite for culture change in the Legislature — though one that could take time.

“We want to be doing a lot more data-driven decision making about which programs and services are really delivering results for Californians,” he told CalMatters. “For us, that metric is not did the money go out the door? But was it impactful? Did it make a difference in results for the people it was intended to serve?”

California currently uses “incremental budgeting:” Each department’s or program’s funding request starts with what they spent last year, updated with best estimates of what they need in the coming year. Also known as “baseline budgeting,” it’s the most common approach states take, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Some public analysis of how programs are working comes from the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office and state agencies, sometimes at the request of lawmakers.

But a CalMatters analysis published in February found that 70% of the 1,118 state agency reports on how laws were working due in the past year had not been submitted to the Office of Legislative Counsel, which keeps reports. And about half of those that were filed were late.

California’s budgeting approach is in contrast to two other systems: performance-based budgeting and zero-based budgeting.

Performance-based budgeting ties funding to how well programs meet their goals, and allows departments more flexibility to use any savings. The data-driven approach can create more transparency, according to research commissioned by the Assembly’s Budget Committee in 2012. But it’s difficult to implement and can be inequitable, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures — for example by linking school funding to test scores. 

Under zero-based budgeting, agency budgets start each year from $0. But no state uses the system in its true form, the conference notes.

While more states are moving towards performance-based budgeting — including Minnesota, New Mexico and Utah — more comprehensive efforts to change California’s system have fizzled.

This year, Fong, who is vice chairperson of the Assembly budget committee, introduced a bill to require state agencies to use zero-based budgeting, but the measure has not been heard in committee.

In 2011, then-Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed a bill requiring state agencies to use performance-based budgeting, saying it would impose a ‘’one size fits all” budget planning process on every state agency and function.

“The politically expedient course would be to sign this bill and bask in the pretense that it is some panacea for our budget woes,” he wrote in his veto message. “But the hard truth is that this bill will mandate thousands of hours of work — at the cost of tens of millions of dollars — with little chance of actual improvement.”

Instead, Brown advocated what he described as a common sense approach to budgeting that would examine whether some programs or departments should exist at all.

Performance-based budgeting also has downsides: A program that’s underperforming may still deserve funding, said lobbyist Kristina Bas Hamilton. “That should be what the policy and budget-making process is about, is having that dialogue,” she said.

And just looking at departments or programs doesn’t show the full picture of state spending, argues Scott Graves, budget director of the California Budget & Policy Center, an advocacy and policy group. That’s because of business and other tax breaks, which are typically renewed year after year.

“Rarely do policymakers come back around and ask, ‘Do they still make sense? Are they effective? Are they achieving the goal for which they were created?’ And as a result, we end up with a lot of waste on the tax expenditure side of the budget,” he said.

“If we’re going to argue for greater scrutiny of state spending and asking what we’re getting for our money, we need to do that not just on the budget side, but we also need to do it on the tax expenditure side.”

Giving taxpayers a voice

Where data doesn’t tell the whole story of which programs are worth funding, public input can fill in some gaps.

Both Senate President Pro Tem Mike McGuire and Gabriel told CalMatters that the budget hearings from January through June are key to the decision-making.

McGuire said his office also receives thousands of comments from the public — emails, postcards, requests for meetings and more.

“It’s not just one source of feedback, but multiple sources of feedback. And by the way, that’s the way it should be,” he said in an interview with CalMatters. “It’s coming from the public, from members themselves, shaped by their lived experiences and opinions, through advocates for nonprofits.”

Various interest groups have mobilized to push back on Newsom’s proposed cuts, including rallies at the Capitol or through virtual campaigns.

Julie Baker, CEO of CA Arts Advocates, said building coalitions has helped the arts community secure funding from legislators in the past.

“They need to know what their constituents care about, and showing up and telling them that we oppose, in this case, the arts cuts — letting them know how that will impact their own communities — is critical for them to understand the decisions that they’re making.”
Greater transparency can help the public form an opinion about state spending, but getting that information isn’t easy. State Sen. Roger Niello, a Roseville Republican, introduced a bill that would have required state agencies to post their expenditures in a clear and accessible way for the public, but the Senate’s appropriations committee killed the bill in last week’s “suspense file” hearings.

On May 1, advocacy groups California Budget & Policy Center, Catalyst California and the Million Voters Project launched the Budget Power Project, which plans to hold workshops to understand the budget, as well as lessons on how to advocate — at cities and counties as well as the state Capitol.

The idea was conceived during the windfall of federal pandemic aid to ensure that money reached communities most in need — and out of a concern that budgets are often crafted in the shadows.

Bas Hamilton — who wrote a book on how to advocate in the Legislature — says the power of public input shouldn’t be underestimated and challenged the notion that the same people, or the loudest people, advocating is a negative.

“They might be representing voices that are marginalized, and that might be the only venue they have to get these messages across,” she said. “I would say there’s a lot of lobbyists in the Capitol, but … some of them are fighting the good fight and having them be the loudest in the room, I would say, isn’t a bad thing at all.”

Changing the budget process

Although the effort to move the state to performance-based budgeting failed, California has seen some big changes to the process — though whether they’ve helped or hurt the state’s finances depends on who you ask.

In 2010, voters passed Proposition 25, which required the Legislature to pass a budget by June 15 or lose pay and also lowered the number of votes needed for passage. While that cut down on political gridlock, Jon Coupal, president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, said it has led to a shoddy budget that is constantly amended the rest of the year.

Because Democrats hold a two-thirds “supermajority” and don’t need Republican votes to pass the budget, there’s no longer a “Big 5” committee, where leaders of both parties negotiate with the governor. It’s now just the Democratic leaders and Newsom. There’s also no Assembly-Senate conference committee, which held public hearings.

Other efforts to change the process have failed.

In 2020, Sen. Scott Wilk introduced a bill to create a two-year budgeting process — the first year for writing the budget, and the second to focus on oversight.

“The reason for that, frankly, is our government — we look at input,” the Republican from Lancaster told CalMatters. “We never look at output. I think there’s programs we start that are no longer effective, are no longer needed, yet, we’re still spending money because everybody’s building their fiefdom.”

A multi-year budget process could have benefits, said Chris Hoene, executive director of the California Budget & Policy Center. “One way to manage the fluctuations that are there would be to sort of admit that economic cycles don’t always adhere to an annual fiscal year.”

That could allow the state to put more money into its reserves, he said. That’s currently limited by the state constitution — another topic that comes up during every budget downturn.

The Legislature has also made some attempts at more oversight, such as splitting up the health and human services budget subcommittees to hone in on each topic, and revamping the accountability committee.

Legislators could also be more mindful of bills that add new costs — though they and the governor’s office won’t have a clear picture of added costs until measures are signed in the fall. Gabriel said he tried to send that message at a Democratic Assembly caucus retreat in January.

“We tried to be really mindful of the costs, because there may be a lot of great policy ideas that folks out there want to pursue,” he said.

Another option to rein in costs each year could be to limit the number of bills legislators introduce. But while members say the volume makes it difficult to really weigh what the financial and other impacts of each bill might be, they also say it could hamper their ability to represent constituents.

And sometimes, a pricey bill or program is worth the fight, according to some legislators.

“These draconian cuts have real life and death consequences and will push our most vulnerable children, families, and aging Californians into homelessness and starvation,” Sen. Caroline Menjivar, a Democrat from Van Nuys, said in a statement in response to Newsom’s proposal. “As legislators, we hold the power to save the most vulnerable among us … I plan to fight back with everything I have.”

On Friday, Southern California Edison filed lawsuits against Los Angeles County and several other agencies over their alleged roles in the Eaton Fire.

Two lawsuits were filed.

In one suit, the utility company alleges Southern California Gas delayed shutting off gas in the burn area for several days after the fire, making the blaze worse.

“SoCalGas’ design and actions caused gas leaks, gas fires, reignition of fires, gas explosions and secondary ignitions during the critical early stages of the Eaton Fire,” according to the suit.

The claim goes on to say this contributed to the spread of the fire and made firefighting and evacuation efforts more difficult.

In the second suit, the utility company alleges the Eaton Fire was made worse by the local government response, “including due to the failures of LASD, LACoFD, OEM and GENASYS in issuing timely evacuation alerts and notifications,” the claim reads.

The same filing says L.A. County was to blame for vegetation and overgrown brush in the Eaton Canyon area that fueled the blaze.

It also named the city of Pasadena and its utility system, Pasadena Water and Power, the city of Sierra Madre, Kinneloa Irrigation District, Rubio Cañon Land & Water Association, Las Flores Water Company and Lincoln Avenue Water Company as parties responsible for water systems running dry in Altadena as the fire broke out.

Edison says hydrants running dry compounded the extent of the disaster.

Those claims will be heard in the L.A. County Superior Court, which is also handling L.A. County’s lawsuit against SoCal Edison.

Edison itself is the subject of hundreds of lawsuits from survivors of the Eaton Fire, which could cost the company billions of dollars in settlements.

Edison has said its equipment likely sparked the Eaton Fire and filed these suits, in part, because it believes these various entities should share some of the blame for the disaster, which resulted in the destruction of thousands of buildings and the deaths of 19 people.

A compensation program Edison established for fire survivors who forgo suing the company has made settlement offers to more than 80 of those who applied.

A new organization is taking over production of the MLK Day Parade, almost 40 years after the first parade was held in South L.A. to commemorate the civil rights leader.

Bakewell Media, publisher of the Los Angeles Sentinel newspaper (a partner of The LA Local), was granted the permit in September to organize the parade for the first time by the Los Angeles Board of Police Commissioners. Formerly called the Kingdom Day Parade, the parade has been rebranded as the Los Angeles Official Martin Luther King Day Parade. The parade was previously produced and organized by Adrian Dove and the L.A. chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality California (CORE-CA).

With less than a week before the parade kicks off, LA Local reporter LaMonica Peters sat down with Danny Bakewell Jr., president and executive editor of the LA Sentinel, to discuss the details and what attendees should expect.

This Jan. 12 interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Why did you decide to produce the MLK Day Parade this year?

Bakewell: It all started because Adrian Dove, who was the previous promoter, had announced that he was retiring. When he announced he was retiring, LAPD, city council offices and other people said, “Hey, we still want to do the MLK Day parade. Would you guys be interested? You have the infrastructure to put it together.” And we said yes.

What’s different about this year’s production?

We’re going to start the parade with a singer performing “Lift Every Voice.” We’re going to play the message from Bernice King at the start of the show. Obviously, we have Cedric the Entertainer as our grand marshal to add the entertainment value, but the community has always been and will continue to be a major part of this parade.

Is ABC 7 covering the parade this year? 

It’s still going to be televised by ABC. We’re working diligently on how the show is going to be, but ABC has been a great partner.

What was the preparation for this parade?

Thanks to our corporate sponsors, we have a number of bands. The truth is, particularly in LAUSD at this time, and other school districts, they don’t have the funding to just get a bus and get here. I can’t say enough about Airbnb to Bank of America, all of our corporate sponsors, who are supporting all of the youth organizations.

Were there any unexpected challenges while preparing for this parade? 

This [The LA Sentinel office on Crenshaw Blvd.] is usually our command center during The Taste of Soul. It dawned on me last week that we’re going to be a mile away [from the parade route]. So, we made the decision to bring in a trailer to be our office at the corner of King and Crenshaw boulevards.

Any special guests this year besides the grand marshal?

I’m working on a surprise guest to be the singer for the national anthem. No matter what, we will give tribute to the Black national anthem “Lift Every Voice” as loud as we can next Monday.

What’s the long-term vision for this parade, if Bakewell Media continues to produce it?

We see the MLK Day Parade, and we want the world to see and expect to see this parade, the same way they see the Macy’s Parade, the Hollywood Parade or the Rose Parade. BET has come in this year as a partner. So there’s an opportunity to possibly do a national broadcast on BET. Not that we would lose our local television, but we see this as a major parade in this community and in the national African American community, celebrating the great work of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. So, we are very excited.

Bits of conversation drift out of Aladdin Used Books as people lined up at the register with stacks of books.

The bustle of activity is bittersweet as the Koreatown bookstore will close its doors at the end of January after 13 years in the neighborhood.

Jina Lee, store manager, said declining sales at the Koreatown branch led to the decision to close the store. In recent years, staffing at the 5,000-square-foot store on the third floor of Madang Mall dropped from six to two, Lee said.

“This was a happy place for everyone,” she said, “but we were struggling.”

On a recent January afternoon, the shop looked lively as customers took advantage of the clearance sale on Korean and English books, CDs, DVDs and other media.

Koreatown resident Jin Lee wishes he visited the bookstore more often.

“It would have been great if it had been this crowded all the time,” Lee said. “But nowadays, people don’t read paper books and prefer devices, so it’s hard for all bookstores.”

Some customers traveled from as far as Orange County and the Inland Empire to visit one last time.

Minjung Kim, who moved from Koreatown to Fullerton five years ago, still made trips to the bookstore after she moved away.

“It’s the only place that sells this many new and used Korean books,” she said.

Each visit to the bookstore was important to David Artiga of Pomona, because it gave him a chance to connect with friends over literature.

“I feel like this is really negative for the community,” he said. “The importance of having a well-versed society, keeping in touch with literature and art is so important. And now this place is just going to be gone.”

South Korea-based Aladdin Used Books opened its first U.S. brick-and-mortar store in Los Angeles in 2013. The store carries around 50,000 new and used books, with a majority in Korean.

Customers will still be able to order books through Aladdin’s website after the store closes.

Ken Derick, a Koreatown resident, walked around the store aisles with a stack of books.

“It’s like we’re kind of moving towards a new technology, like everything’s virtual and online,” he said.

Longtime customer Anthony Kim said he’s enjoyed looking for gems in the English-language shelves.

“My Korean ability is rather limited but I’ve always enjoyed browsing their English language sections,” he said. “And now that I have a niece and nephew, their children’s book section has always been a great place to pick up new books for them.”

Valerie Laguna perused the shop’s CD section, a bygone experience in the era of streaming.

“I really like their CD collection and their literature collection they have in English,” she said.

“I was so sad about it, I immediately texted my friend,” she said. “I’ve gotten so many of my favorite books and my favorite CDs from this place. I feel like losing a place like this is just so sad and makes a huge dent in the community and culture.”

Less than a mile away on Western Avenue, Happy Bookstore owner Jung Jae-seung said it has been difficult for bookstores for some time now. His Korean-language bookstore is also struggling in an era when so many people have abandoned print media.

“It’s really about how long printed books can survive,” Jung said. “From that point of view, it’s hard to be optimistic.”

South L.A. or South Central? More than 20 years ago, that question came with high emotions for some residents who were sick of the stereotypes they saw in media coverage of their neighborhoods.

So in 2003, the Los Angeles City Council renamed the collection of communities south of the 10 freeway in an attempt to cut ties with the connotations of poverty and crime that some believe came to represent South Central after the turbulence of the 1980s and ‘90s. Today, you see South L.A. on official documents, maps and even historical and cultural districts.

Even though city officials moved to wipe away the old name, some locals never stopped calling the area South Central — a name that for them represents history, resilience and Black and Latino culture.

“I think it will always be South Central for its residents and for the people that were born and raised here,” said Evelyn Alfaro-Macias, a social worker who was raised in Historic South Central and whose office is on Hoover Street. “It means home. It means culture. People should respect the name South Central.”

What and where is South LA, anyway?

By the early 2000s, television news and pop culture had given South Central a reputation for violence and chaos that some were eager to shake.

Helen Johnson, a resident of Vermont Square, helped lead the campaign to change the name.

“I think the media can make you or either break you,” 72-year-old Johnson told reporters in 2003 after the city council approved the name change, according to the L.A. Times. “This is what you’ve done to us. You’ve broke us.”

Supporters of the change included then-Councilmember Janice Hahn, who is now a county supervisor and said at the time that the South Central name had become “mostly derogatory.”

L.A. Mayor Karen Bass, who was working then as executive director of the nonprofit Community Coalition, said the area’s image problem wasn’t just about its name.

“If the media paid a little more attention to covering positive things in the community, that will also help,” Bass said, according to an L.A. Times report.

The LA Local has reached out Bass and Hahn’s offices, as well as L.A. City Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson.

The exact borders of South Los Angeles, or the area formerly known as South Central, are fuzzy.

The South Central name originally only applied to the neighborhood around Central Avenue south of downtown Los Angeles, but it spread west as populations grew.

City planning documents today designate a strip of neighborhoods between Interstate 110 and Arlington Avenue as South Los Angeles and tag the Central Avenue neighborhood as Historic South Central. Others, including academics and the city tourism board, use a map of South Los Angeles that stretches to the border of Culver City.

This is what the community told us

Some businesses in the area adopted the South L.A. name, notably South LA Cafe, the coffee shop that has grown to five locations and become a local institution.

More recently, some groups have made a concerted effort to embrace South Central, like the South Central Run Club or South Central Clips, an Instagram-based group that sells skatewear-inspired “South Central” apparel. (Even South LA Cafe today sells some merch with the South Central name.)

Several locals told The LA Local the official designation never changed anything for them.

“It’s South Central for me. That’s where my roots are,” April Brown said. “When you go anywhere across the country, across the world and you say South Central, they know exactly what you’re talking about.”

To Emily Amador, the name change erases the history of South Central, including “the Black migration that occurred, redlining that created what we know today to be South Central and the demographics, which are here today, which is Black and brown and undocumented.”

Ulysses Alfaro, who was born and raised in the Historic South Central neighborhood, said he uses South L.A. with people from out of town but South Central with locals.

South L.A. is a geographic designator, he said, but he considers South Central to be an identity: “That’s where the grinders are, the hard-working people that work their butts off, their asses off. The ones that keep the city running.”