LA City Council saves 1,000 jobs in revised budget; plan reduces LAPD staffing

The Los Angeles City Council on Thursday voted, 12-3, to approve a revised budget that reduces the number of layoffs proposed by Mayor Karen Bass — in part by shrinking the size of the Police Department.

The plan averts 1,000 layoffs, lowering the number of city workers who will lose their jobs to 650.

Bass, facing a nearly $1 billion deficit, had proposed 1,647 layoffs that she acknowledged would have resulted in a reduction in a wide range of city services.

“The revised budget restores these services, ensuring we can clean our streets, trim trees, fix sidewalks and street lights, and make streets more safe,” Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky said during the meeting.

Yaroslavsky, whose District 5 includes Bel Air, Westwood and Hancock Park, chairs the budget committee.

“What we tried to do with this budget is make something good out of a bad situation,” she said. “This is the most serious budget crisis the city has seen in nearly two decades.”

At a news conference after the council vote, Councilmember Bob Blumenfield said city services will inevitably suffer. 

“You can’t take a billion dollars out of the budget and not have reduced services,” he said. “I don’t want to put lipstick on this situation.”

The $13.9 billion budget is for the fiscal year that starts July 1. Bass still needs to sign off on it.

Councilmembers Monica Rodriguez, Traci Park and John Lee voted against the budget, mostly denouncing the move to reduce police hires and citing numerous audits that have found the city’s system of addressing homelessness is, in one audit’s words, “extremely broken.”

“I don't think we should spend another penny on homelessness,” Park said during the meeting.

“All we have done is rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic,” Rodriguez said.

Changes to LAPD budget

One of the big differences between the council budget and the mayor’s plan is in police hiring.

The council reduced the number of police officers hired in the next year from 480 to 240, a move designed in part to save specialized civilian jobs at the department, including fingerprint and rape kit analysts. Bass had proposed more than 400 civilian layoffs. This plan calls for laying off about 280.

The change means the LAPD, taking into account attrition, will shrink to 8,400 officers by June 2026. Just five years ago, it employed more than 10,000 officers.

“We’re reaching critical lows,” Assistant Chief Dan Randolph said in an interview.

Councilmembers Park, Lee and Rodriguez voted against the motion to hire fewer officers.

The council plans to revisit the decision during the year if revenue projections improve.

Yaroslavsky was wary of any improvement.

“I’m concerned about tariffs. I’m concerned about recession,” she said in an interview before the vote, adding she’s also worried about the Trump administration’s funding for local programs, including housing and medical care. “All sorts of things that trickle down to local government or that our partners in the nonprofit sector rely upon — that’s drying up.”

Other changes

The council budget made a series of other changes to Bass’ plan in order to reduce layoffs.

It reduced by 10% — or $10 million — funding for the mayor’s signature Inside Safe program, which seeks to provide temporary housing and services for people on the streets. Part of the cut calls for double instead of single occupancy for people who accept shelter.

The budget also eliminates the mayor’s plan to create street medicine teams at the Fire Department, for a savings of $12 million. The department’s budget will still be $76 million higher than last year’s, allowing fire officials to hire more firefighters and buy new fire trucks. The 9% increase in the fire budget is the highest among departments.

Still, Park, whose District 11 includes the fire-ravaged Pacific Palisades, said the Fire Department’s budget should have been higher.

“The budget does not meet the day-to-day needs of the Fire Department,” she said. Her motion to increase funding failed.

In addition, the council approved an increase in parking meter fees — a move expected to raise about $14 million a year.

“We needed to spread out the pain,” Blumenfield, vice chair of the budget committee from District 3 in the West Valley, said in an interview before the vote.

Reducing layoffs

The proposed layoffs would affect a number of departments, including sanitation, street services and transportation.

Budget officials hope to further reduce the number of layoffs by transferring people whose salaries are paid by the general fund to city agencies that manage their own budgets, including the Department of Water and Power, the Port of Los Angeles and the airport.

“We’re grateful to the work the council did to restore those positions,” said Roy Smaan, president of the Engineers & Architects Association. “The original proposal relied too heavily on layoffs.”

“Any number of layoffs will have an impact on city services as well as on the workload that’s left behind,” he added.

Yaroslavsky said the only way to further reduce layoffs is for labor union leaders to agree to delay or forgo cost-of-living increases or to furloughs.

“Labor, now we need you to come to the table,” she said.

One reason L.A. is in dire financial straits is because of generous contracts city officials signed with labor union leaders last year. The wage added about $250 million to the budget.

Other factors include soaring legal liability costs and lower-than-expected tax revenues. Business and sales taxes are both down, according to city officials, while hotel and property taxes, which make up 35% of revenues, are expected to be below projected growth.

There are currently about 38,000 city positions, not counting the Water and Power and Harbor departments and the airport. In all, the city employs 32,405 people.

The revised budget included the creation of a new Bureau of Homelessness Oversight. Councilmember Nithya Raman, whose District 4 stretches from Los Feliz to Reseda, championed the new agency, which she said would monitor and collect data on how programs for the unhoused are working in the city.

“It will help us to use those hundreds of millions of dollars better to get people indoors,” she said.

The budget does not allocate any money to the new bureau, which will be housed in the Los Angeles Housing Department.

Officials also said the revised budget means no animal shelter will close.