My Statement on the Los Angeles City Budget Crisis
By: Councilmember Marqueece Harris-Dawson
Tags: City Budget, Defundthepolice, Los Angeles, Covid 19, City Council

The City is facing a $675 million budget deficit and city revenue continues to plummet. It’s unacceptable that working people are being asked to bear the brunt of the economic fallout from the pandemic. Any reduction in city services amounts to lowering the quality of life for working-class and low-income residents in our city. This is a dire moment, but I believe, as painful as it will be, we can find a way forward if residents are organized, informed, and engaged.

Budgetary solutions during this crisis involve lowering our quality of life, and reducing critical city services is always a last resort — especially during a pandemic when demand for services is high. The police union has repeatedly taken a public stance and refuses to even discuss postponing raises. Even if every other bargaining unit delays or defrays benefits, we would still fall far short of the required cuts. Cooperation from the LAPPL is key at this moment.

While cities, states, counties, small businesses, families, workers, and students are all required to accept cutbacks — corporate property owners and the wealthiest aren’t being asked to contribute in even the slightest way! Even billionaires who have made record profits are not facing pressure to help communities survive this pandemic. Instead, they spent hundreds of millions to beat back corporate property tax fairness and even more to allow large corporations to pay workers less than minimum wage with no benefits. Voters went along with those initiatives, declining to support ballot measures that would grant employment benefits to rideshare drivers and allow local governments to enact rent control. As a result, billionaires increase their wealth on a daily basis, while our children, our neighborhoods, and our future languish under crushing disinvestment.

These decisions leave the City of Los Angeles in the position of choosing between combatting homelessness and cleaning our streets. Between providing youth services, or rapid emergency response times. Between our libraries, parks, senior centers, and investing in the women and men of our mighty LA Fire Department. These are all false choices, forced upon us by a rigged economy.

The LAPD represents 50% of the City’s discretionary spending. Therefore, half of the spending the City can cut is allocated within the LAPD budget. Last year the Council and Mayor gave our officers a long-overdue pay increase and education benefit. They negotiated this compensation fair and square. However, at this moment, delaying their raise and new benefits is something worthy of discussion. Doing so would alleviate much of the budget crisis and set the tone for other employee bargaining units to do the same. Failure to postpone these raises would mean a wave of layoffs for sworn and civilian city employees.

Ironically, Trump’s failure to produce a COVID relief package led us to this position. In his abject failure as a leader, President Trump unwittingly enacted the desires of Black Lives Matter and fervent activists around the country — it will, in fact, be Donald J. Trump that “Defunds the Police”. Bizarre.