Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, or as my friends at the LA City Department of Recreation and Parks like to call him “Tony”, has found a new way to save the city’s mounting deficit, layoffs.
Winning the mayoral seat on the promise of putting a thousand more cops on the street to keep Los Angeles safe, “Tony” has had to cut much needed programs to offset the cost of those additional thousand police officers. The first wave of cuts came to gang prevention programs. After all who needs gang prevention when we have a thousand more boys in blue?
We need cops I’m just not sure that adding a thousand more is worth the offset to other programs. I love my civil servants in fact I used to be one. I used to be a recreation instructor with the Department of Recreation and Parks, but was laid off in February 2009. Or so I thought. For seven months I waited for my layoff paperwork to arrive so I could file for unemployment. It wasn’t until I lost my second job at the LA Gay and Lesbian Center, also due to budget cuts, and received their layoff paperwork that I was able to receive unemployment, like the other 10% of Los Angeles County.
The City has a wonderful little trick they can play with their part time employees. Rather than lay them off in a timely manner they can bank the layoffs until a mandate comes down issuing a round of layoffs. To this day I have never received any paperwork concerning my layoff nearly a year and a half ago. The last time I spoke to anyone in Human Resources they said that my status had been changed to “not working right now”.
While this new round of layoffs will not affect my employment with the City, it will have a major effect on the City itself. This next round hits childcare. Nearly a third of the layoffs are to the Department of Recreation and Parks specifically to the childcare centers. In a recession the obvious choice to balance a budget is to remove social services for lower income residents and boost the number of police officers on the street. This will create a greater burden on the lower classes and justify the utilization of a strong police force.
Maybe “Tony” is hoping that all the people who utilize Recreation and Parks childcare will apply for federal or state run programs, thus alleviating the burden from the City’s budget.
What seems oddest to me is that the programs being cut are not the ones that are problematic. These programs are the ones proven to work and have both fiscal and societal relevance.
Saddest of all, the cutting to Parks and Recreation has not concluded. Once the Summer Camps are over, there will be another round of layoffs. This is because most revenue generated by the Department of Recreation and Park’s income is generated by Summer Camp, Summer Session activities and permits from June through September.
It seems to me that if more money was focused on prevention and proactive pursuits, than on reactive endeavors, like the massive amounts of overtime clocked by the fire department or the police departments massive hiring, not only would the city be in much better shape fiscally but socially and logically as well.
In 2006 “Tony” proposed raising the trash fees from eighteen dollars to twenty eight dollars to help fund his pet hiring project. These layoffs seem to have the same effect, but instead of affecting all citizens equally and putting it to a vote, it is the city employees, middle and lower class citizens of Los Angeles that will be primarily affected.
Instead of just another rant, with no proposed solution I would like to reiterate an email I sent to “Tony” two years ago. His office sent out an email to all the city employees asking for suggestions on how we could cut back and help with the deficit. My response, “if you take one of those thousand police officers, posted one at each park and had them write citations for parking infractions, dogs of leash, drinking or drug activity, we wouldn’t have a deficit.”
On any given day at least ten people would have their dog(s) off leash at the Rustic Canyon Park in Pacific Palisades. If each person was issued a twenty five dollar ticket, the park would bring in two hundred and fifty dollars a day. Multiply that by three hundred and sixty five that brings in $91,250.00. Now there are roughly two hundred and forty five parks that are listed on laparks.org if each of these parks brought in the same revenue for leash infractions that would net $22,356,250.00 a year, just for having your dog off its leash. Add revenue from parking infractions and illegal activity and that sounds like a prospect worth looking into.
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