How serious is L.A. City Hall about layoffs? The messages have been mixed

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass delivered the bad news last week to a room full of activists in South Los Angeles: With the city in financial trouble, jobs were on the chopping block.

Yet the way Bass framed the situation, it was hard to tell how bad the news really was.

“I’m going to have to propose layoffs,” she told the audience convened by Black Lives Matter-Los Angeles. “But I don’t think it’s going to happen, OK? I don’t. I don’t. But I have to propose that, because by law the budget has to come out on Monday, by April 21.

“But, but — I believe that there are some solutions, like from the state, that will help us so that we don’t have to do layoffs ultimately, because the budget won’t be signed for several more weeks,” she added.

The mayor released her proposed spending plan for 2025-26 three days later, and the outlook was indeed dire — perhaps the toughest city budget in 15 years. Her budget advisers produced a list of nearly 1,650 positions targeted for layoffs, plus nearly 1,100 vacant posts that would be eliminated.

On paper, the mayor has called for reductions to a wide array of agencies, including transportation, planning and street services. In person, however, Bass has sounded far more hesitant.

Bass, both before and after releasing her budget, said she is hoping that financial aid from Gov. Gavin Newsom and the state Legislature will help her close the budget gap and avoid layoffs. She made a trip to Sacramento on Wednesday to talk to state lawmakers.

City Councilmember Monica Rodriguez said she, too, was in Sacramento this week, but heard little enthusiasm for an L.A. rescue package. She voiced concern about the heavy emphasis on state aid at City Hall, saying the city’s workforce is getting an unrealistic view of the unfolding budget crisis.

“It’s providing false promises and false hope on all fronts,” she said. “We have to be honest about what we’re confronting.”

The city’s labor negotiators have already begun meeting with union leaders to ask them to postpone this year’s pay raises, which are expected to add $250 million to the upcoming budget. As long as the focus is on financial assistance from the state, those unions will have little incentive to make the types of concessions that could bring the budget into balance, Rodriguez said.

The mayor’s appearance in South Los Angeles wasn’t the only time she expressed her desire to avoid job cuts. On Tuesday, addressing reporters in the San Fernando Valley, she sounded equally hesitant when asked about her plan to lay off 400 civilian city workers at the LAPD.

“Obviously we’ll do that very surgically, to make sure that the civilians who are laid off — if we get to that, which I am certainly hopeful we will not,” she said. “If we get to that, we will have to look at the ones that will have the least impact to public safety.”

In some ways, the mayor’s budget strategy resembles the one carried out 15 years ago by then-Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. During that financial crisis, Villaraigosa initially called for thousands of layoffs, in an effort to pressure public employee unions to return to the bargaining table.

That strategy drew a furious response from some of the city’s employee unions, who distributed posters comparing Villaraigosa to Wisconsin’s then-Gov. Scott Walker, viewed at that time as a strident foe of organized labor.

Bass, by comparison, has been working much more closely with the city’s labor unions. In an interview, she touted that collaborative approach — and pushed back against the idea that she is offering them false hope.

“I wouldn’t be up in Sacramento … if I did not believe there was a possibility that we could get support,” she said.

Bass, a former state lawmaker, said she is familiar both with Sacramento and with tough budget decisions, having served as state Assembly speaker in the wake of the 2008 global recession, when billions were carved out of the state budget.

The mayor’s proposed budget, now before the City Council’s budget committee, is aimed at closing a financial gap of nearly $1 billion by July 1, the start of the fiscal year.

The money needed to stave off layoffs is considerably less.

The city needs $282 million to prevent the elimination of more than 2,700 city positions, and just $150 million to stave off the 1,650 layoffs, according to City Administrative Officer Matt Szabo.

(The mayor’s proposed budget assumes layoffs would go into effect by the end of October, producing eight months of savings. After a full year, layoffs would generate $225 million in savings, Szabo said.)

The stakes for the city are high. On Friday, the ratings agency S&P Global lowered its bond rating on two types of city debt. Those reductions were driven in large part by the city’s ongoing financial woes and the reduction in the size of its reserve fund.

S&P said it could revise its outlook to a more favorable one if city leaders enact “sufficient budgetary cuts to offset stagnant economic recovery and revenue growth.”

Jack Humphreville, a member of the Neighborhood Council Budget Advocates, which weighs in on city spending, voiced his own doubts about the prospects for significant state aid. If state officials bail out L.A., he said, then they will also have to help San Francisco and all the other local governments facing financial difficulties.

“They might as well form a line,” he said.

If state aid isn’t forthcoming, the city could still find other ways to eliminate positions without laying off workers. For example, many could be reassigned to jobs in city departments that are unaffected by the budget crisis.

Efforts are already underway to identify vacant positions at the Port of Los Angeles, Los Angeles World Airports and the Department of Water and Power, all of which operate separately from the city’s general fund budget, which pays for core services such as police, firefighters and paramedics.

Those transfers could provide a replay of the 2008 recession, when several hundred workers were transferred to the DWP from various city agencies, sparing them from unemployment. Under that scenario, the city services provided by those workers still went away.

State of play

— BUDGET BLOWBACK: There were plenty of repercussions from the release of Bass’ budget proposal. Some voiced alarm over planned layoffs at the Department of Transportation. Others worried about street trees. Still others were focused on the Police Department, whose leaders warned that layoffs of civilian employees would result in the closure of three jails. Only the Fire Department received the go-ahead to make a significant number of hires — more than 200, per the mayor’s spending plan.

— A FULL PLATE: For L.A.’s mayor, the problems have been piling up. She is contending not only with a homelessness crisis, post-wildfire rebuilding and a budget meltdown, but also shrinking film and television production, a downturn in housing construction and a potential downturn in trade and tourism. Bass acknowledged the various challenges but told The Times they are not insurmountable.

— PERMIT PLUNGE: Speaking of housing, L.A. approved permits for 1,325 homes during the first quarter of 2025, a decrease of nearly 57% compared to the same period a year earlier. Those paltry figures — driven by a variety of causes — were only the latest batch of bad news about the city’s housing affordability crisis.

—CONTRACT CRUNCH: Unions representing L.A. County firefighters and sheriff’s deputies made a bid for public support for their increasingly testy contract negotiations, releasing a documentary highlighting their members’ work during the January wildfires. The pitch comes a month after county budget officials said they can’t afford raises during a time of major economic uncertainty.

— TREE TRAUMA: A homeless man was arrested this week on suspicion of taking a chain saw to trees in downtown Los Angeles, Westlake, Glassell Park and possibly other neighborhoods. The man was arrested at a homeless encampment that was the target of an Inside Safe operation in February.

— DO-OVER TIME: The Santa Ynez Reservoir, which stood empty in Pacific Palisades during the Palisades fire, will need to be emptied and repaired for a second time, after workers discovered more holes in the reservoir’s floating cover. The reservoir is currently one-quarter full.

— ALPHABET SOUP: L.A. voters have passed two tax increases over the last three years to pay for housing and homelessness programs. Now those measures have spurred the creation of a head-spinning number of oversight agencies, each with their own initialisms: ECRHA, LACAHSA, LTRHA and ULACOC. As the LAT’s Doug Smith points out, it’s a lot for the average voter to keep track of.

— DE LEÓN DINGED: Former Councilmember Kevin de León was fined $18,750 by the Ethics Commission for participating in decisions in which he had a financial interest and for failing to properly disclose income he received shortly before taking office. De León had worked for USC and a housing program run by the AIDS Healthcare Foundation shortly before joining the council in 2020.

— GETTING TO LAX: The LAX/Metro Transit Center is scheduled to open on June 6, moving a direct rail connection to Los Angeles International Airport one step closer to reality. The station, located at Aviation Boulevard and 96th Street, will eventually connect passengers to an automated people mover that will arrive at the actual airport.

— HOUSING HELP: The Board of Water and Power Commissioners, whose members are picked by the mayor, approved a housing allowance of up to $120,000 each for two new executives at the Department of Water and Power: Kendall Helm and Zoraya Griffin, both hired by the utility’s CEO, Janisse Quiñones. One DWP employee told the board during public comment that the housing allowance was a waste of money, saying there were already qualified internal candidates in the L.A. area.

— PICKEL’S PARTING SHOT: DWP ratepayer advocate Fred Pickel is retiring — this time for real. Pickel, who was originally scheduled to step down two years ago, used his final appearance at the DWP board to argue that the utility should review its rates far more frequently than once a decade. “With that, I’m going to depart,” he said. “Mic drop,” responded Commissioner Nurit Katz.

QUICK HITS

• Where is Inside Safe? The mayor’s signature program to combat homelessness went to two neighborhoods this week: Valley Boulevard in El Sereno, represented by Councilmember Ysabel Jurado, and the area around Paxton Park in Pacoima, represented by Councilmember Monica Rodriguez.
• On the docket for next week: The City Council’s budget committee takes up the mayor’s 2025-26 spending all of next week, with labor leaders appearing on Monday, public safety agencies speaking on Wednesday and the homelessness budget discussed on Thursday.

Stay in touch

That’s it for this week! Send your questions, comments and gossip to LAontheRecord@latimes.com. Did a friend forward you this email? Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Saturday morning.