Why this LA Councilmember votes no on the city’s budget
June 14, 2024
Welcome to the seventh issue of Report Forward by journalist Alissa Walker.
THE BIG REPORT
“Investing in the services that catch our people when they are in crises is an investment that pays dividends down the line,” Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez said before voting no on the city’s budget
Last month, Los Angeles City Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez voted against approving the city’s $12.8 billion budget. It was the second time that Hernandez had voted no, and this time, she was joined by Councilmembers Nithya Raman and Hugo Soto-Martínez. In remarks Hernandez made in council just before the vote, she called the budget a “crisis of our own making,” noting how it allocates one-quarter of its dollars to one department, LAPD, while forcing severe cuts on chronically underfunded departments. “Studies have shown again and again that preventing harm and violence is much cheaper than responding to it,” she said. “Investing in the services that catch our people when they are in crises is an investment that pays dividends down the line.” Hernandez spoke with Report Forward about what got funded, what got cut, and what changes she’d like to see in the budget process.
Alissa Walker: You’ve talked very openly about the problems with LA City’s budget and how it’s indicative of where we are as a city. Do you remember how you started noticing these discrepancies?
Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez: Last year, I was the only one on the council to vote “no” on the budget, because of what I was seeing. I saw that we invested over $6 million in police uniforms for the LAPD and just a few pages after, the entire Youth Development Department that’s supposed to be serving the young people of the city of Los Angeles, we only invested $2.3 million. That, for me, was a reflection of the entire budget of the city of Los Angeles, of how we prioritize our money. The city of LA has a youth population just above 800,000. That's nearly a quarter of our entire city population. Yet nearly a quarter of our entire city budget goes into one department, which is the LAPD.
You’ve also been very vocal about how this lopsided budget impacts how long it takes to receive basic city services.
It takes us 10 years to fix a sidewalk in the City of Los Angeles. And that's if your sidewalk gets on the fix-it list. If it doesn't get on the fix-it list, it never gets fixed. There are trees in my district that haven't been trimmed in over a decade. It takes us five years to install a blue handicap curb. All of these things take us so long compared to other cities, because we do not invest in this infrastructure. We have light poles that have fallen on people, where we're having to pay out $20 million lawsuits, instead of actually fixing the things. What I was told was that $20 million would fund the entire unit within the Bureau of Street Lighting that could be working on the anti-theft work that needs to be done around the copper in our streetlights.
The mayor attempted to balance the budget by cutting vacant positions. During the final week some final negotiations added back some jobs to departments like Street Services, so we can get a few more sidewalks fixed. But these are departments, to your point, where you really do notice the vacancies.
We're going to start feeling the impact of those losses. Some of these vacant positions are critical to actually doing the work. Like the leaders of certain teams, the actual people who are on the ground, fixing our sidewalks, these vacancies are incredibly impactful, and will delay our work. And as a city, we make it incredibly difficult to bring back those positions. So once they're deleted, they're deleted. And that's how we lose historical knowledge. That's how we lose skills.
“We’re going to be in a deficit until 2028. This is a self-inflicted wound. We, as a council, did this to the city of Los Angeles.”
What can the city change about the hiring process?
It takes people many months to get employment here in the city. And this goes for all departments. Like we have a shortage of PSRS, police service responders, which are our 911 dispatchers. And it takes us many months to hire people on. And right now, many of our PSRS are mandated to do overtime, because we don't have the coverage. Some of these hiring processes are ordinance based, which means we can change them, and some of us have been actively trying to do that, myself around the PSRS. But there's a lot that's actually governed by the charter around hiring. And so in our government reform ad hoc committee, we've been talking about what changes need to happen during the charter reform process, so that our hiring process can become more efficient and faster, because we're losing good people to other departments. We're losing people to other cities. Even my brother applied and it took him about nine months total just to go through the first step. So it's a very arduous process.
We also see issues that seem to be broadly popular with the council but keep getting delayed when it comes to money. I’m thinking about unarmed response, which we’ve talked about before, which can’t seem to get adequately funded, even though it does seem to have this very strong council support behind it.
Last year we got $15 million dollars to build out an alternate crisis response system in the budget cycle. We had to wait many, many months for the contracts to be approved with the providers to begin launching this work. For a lot of us, this is not a pet project. Takar Smith was killed in my district in January of 2023. This is critically important. But when it comes time to implement the work, the city is just really terrible at it. I know that the political will is there, but I don't know if the political will is there to actually implement it effectively.
There have been a lot of conversations this year about a few proposed reforms to the budget process: introducing a capital infrastructure plan, or even just planning two years in advance instead of one. What have you been talking about as a way to fix this?
I've been vocal about a two-year budget process and in addition to that, a robust community engagement plan. What we've seen in my two years here in this budget process is that there's not a lot of community engagement in the budget. A lot of it happens in the back rooms. And oftentimes, we get served a budget in front of us that's 95 percent cooked. I would like to see a more open and transparent budgeting process that not only includes the community but councilmembers as well, so you can really think things through and have more public discussions about what we're walking the city into. We're going to be in a deficit until 2028. This is a self-inflicted wound. We, as a council, did this to the city of Los Angeles. So I would hope that a two-year budget process allows us for better analysis, better projections, space to move resources when they are not spent because a lot of dollars go unused just because of the enormity of the budget. And so that's what I'm aiming for, a two-year budget process, where we have robust community engagement and a transparent and open process for all our elected leaders here in the city.
You’ve done some of this within your own district.
We've conducted a few budget trainings for the community. We tell people, this is what your budget looks like, this is where the money is coming from: your property taxes, your rent, when you buy things locally. This is how it's being spent. And this is why we can't fix your sidewalks. I represent 22 neighborhoods, yet that's all I can offer, because that's all that's budgeted, but these one-on-ones have been very illuminating for our community. And I think it's been very helpful for them to understand why the city is failing so much.
On May 24, LA’s budget passed 12-3 with Councilmembers Hernandez, Raman, and Soto-Martínez voting no
Let's talk about some good things. What did you get into the budget that you want people to know that you fought for and are happy about?
I don't want to see any cuts made to the departments that actually provide services and programming to families and young people and elders. So we pushed for funding for the Department of Aging. At Recreation and Parks, we've pushed for those jobs not to be eliminated, and a good chunk of those jobs were kept. The Community Investment for Families Department (CFID) and Economic and Workforce Development Department (EWDD) are two departments that do phenomenal work. But the work that they do is grant funded. So we pushed to keep positions that were going to be eliminated that would help administer grants. Without these jobs, we wouldn't be able to use these grants or actually give out the money. And for me, that's really important, especially because they're not tapping into our general fund for these positions.
Actually, I think there were a few good examples like that of trying to creatively move money around in these final negotiations.
We know that LAPD has been having a difficult time hiring people. We give them all the positions that they asked for, at a certain rate. And sometimes they don't even hire that number. So that money just sits there. What we tried to do instead is ask for some of it to be set aside into the unappropriated balance. So let's say they don't hire the number of people that they need, then that funding in this account could hopefully go to LA's BEST Afterschool Enrichment Program, because we cut over $2 million from this after-school program that helps keep kids in school while their parents are working.
And these things have real impacts on families, especially when they don’t know until the last minute if they’ll have access to childcare. It's very, very stressful.
And that’s a shame that families have to go through that struggle, because that’s what I think about when I think about public safety. That is public safety. Have you seen that work framed as public safety? So it's just disappointing. And it’s very sad that for the amount of taxes that people pay, that the city is not delivering on the things that they need for their families to thrive and actually make it here. LA County Supervisor Holly Mitchell says that a budget is a statement of our values. A budget that gives 25 percent to law enforcement and makes everybody else fight for crumbs and leaves us with a time period of 10 years of fixing a sidewalk is not the budget that meets my values or meets the demands of my constituents.
Need more budget resources? LAist put together an excellent LA city budget explainer. Metro has a fun tool where you can decide where its $9 billion budget goes. The California Budget and Policy Center is the best resource for how the state budget works. CalMatters explores how California swung so dramatically from surplus to deficit. And what about LA County, which is larger in population than 41 states? LA Public Press has a guide to the county’s $45.5 billion budget, which this year includes more much-needed money for mental health responders.
Saturday, June 15 is Budget Day! This is the annual convening of Budget Advocates, an independent consortium of Neighborhood Council representatives who provide community input on the city’s budget. This year’s event will feature a primer on how the budget works and a panel discussion with city leaders. In addition, the 2024 Budget Advocates white paper, Who Does the Work?, is an excellent overview of the challenges the city faces. RSVP for the event, held at City Hall.
PROGRESS REPORT
As the city’s charter turned 100 years old on May 6, Raphael Sonenshein, Executive Director of the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation and a member of the Los Angeles Governance Reform Project, shared lessons from the last time the city got serious about reform: “In 2024 as a century ago, the wider civic community, not just the city council, should be part of deciding what reforms reach the ultimate deciders of all charter changes — the voters.” The following week, after a year of discussions prompted by the fallout from the Fed Tapes and a revolving door of corruption cases, LA’s City Council advanced a disappointingly diluted governance reform package.
Data from a FM3 Research poll released by Fair Rep LA in 2023 showed majority support for governance reforms
Headed to the November 2024 ballot are two measures: 1) a weakened ethics reform plan where councilmembers have final say over ballot measures that the commission wants to put in front of voters 2) an independent redistricting plan so councilmembers will have no say over where lines are drawn. While a newly created charter reform commission will review and consider other changes, what the council did not advance are additional reforms which were not only strongly recommended by diverse groups of coalitions and academics, but also broadly popular in polling and surveys citywide: taking councilmembers out of land-use decisions, switching to ranked-choice voting, and expanding a council that hasn’t grown in size since 1924. But just because the council upheld the status quo doesn’t mean the fight for change is over, said Jonathan Mehta Stein, executive director of California Common Cause. “This is a disheartening setback, but we will not allow this to be the end of the road for ethics reform in Los Angeles.”
LOCAL REPORT
60% of Angelenos have considered leaving LA due to high housing costs, according to an annual Los Angeles Business Council survey. Over three-fourths of those polled supported expanding the city’s Executive Directive 1, which fast-tracks the construction of low- and moderate-income housing, to include apartments for middle-income residents as well.
$1,000 monthly payments would get thousands of homeless Angelenos off the street and save the city millions in services, argues a new brief by four homelessness policy scholars: “Los Angeles has created a very complex, bureaucratic, and expensive system that struggles to find even ‘interim’ housing for those who are unhoused. That system ignores the potential of many unhoused people to solve their housing problems if they had a little more money.”
96.3 billion gallons of stormwater have been captured by LA County since October, enough to supply water to nearly one-fourth of the county’s population for a year. But this was the second-wettest winter in LA history, and with better infrastructure investments funded through Measure W’s Safe Clean Water Program, the county could be capturing so much more.
STATE REPORT
ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT: A new report on Project Roomkey (PRK) shows that the statewide effort to use empty hotel rooms to house homeless people during the early years of the pandemic did save lives and advance the overall level of care for interim housing, but didn’t result in more housing placements — only 19 percent of LA County PRK clients moved into permanent housing.
UNEQUAL STATE: The gap between high and low incomes is wider in California than in all but seven states, according to new Public Policy Institute of America data. In California, families in the 90th percentile of income distribution are earning 10 times more than the families at the 10th percentile of income distribution — $305,000 vs. $29,000 annually.
THE CEQA IS OUT: A Little Hoover Commission report warns that the state must broadly exempt housing development from the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) to have a striking chance at building a planned 2.5 million homes: “California will never achieve its housing goals as long as CEQA has the potential to turn housing development into something akin to urban warfare.”
COUNTERPOINT: The Little Hoover Commission’s process to interrogate CEQA was flawed, says Julia Stein, Project Director for the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at UCLA School of Law, who strongly disagrees with their findings.
FIELD REPORT
What it looks like to deliver 400,000 signatures — the most ever collected for a county ballot initiative — to the LA County Registrar
On May 7, a broad coalition of housing and labor advocates gathered at the LA County Registrar to deliver over 400,000 signatures from LA County voters supporting the Affordable Housing, Homelessness Solutions and Prevention Now Measure — the first-ever countywide citizen’s initiative. What is set to appear on the November 2024 ballot will repeal 2016’s Measure H and replace it with a half-cent sales tax that expands housing affordability programs and mental health services, implements stronger accountability metrics, and provides dedicated funding for LACAHSA, a new housing authority for LA County. Learn more about the campaign and read the full measure.
REPORT IN
Hi, Alissa Walker here — I’ll be compiling Report Forward every month. Please send reports, studies, white papers, and big policy wins to me at reports@laf.institute — and forward this to someone working to make LA a better place.
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