Drug-abuse education for schoolchildren, building code enforcement and community arts programs all may be on the chopping block as Los Angeles Mayor James K. Hahn's office gave the first indication Thursday of how he plans to close an approximately $250-million hole in the city budget.
Hahn does not plan to propose a budget for the 2004-05 fiscal year until April. But his office has been working for months to prioritize city services and identify those that could be trimmed or eliminated to make up the projected shortfall.
On Thursday, the mayor's budget director sketched a list that includes scaling back city support for the arts, closing youth programs, reducing inspections of problem properties, and suspending a program that closed alleys that were magnets for illegal dumping and drug trafficking.
Budget director Doane Liu emphasized that the plans are preliminary, and that no figures were attached to the programs in Thursday's presentation. The mayor's office projects a total shortfall of $350 million in the budget year that begins July 1, but plans to mitigate that figure with the use of $100 million in reserve funds.
Among the programs likely to face elimination first, according to the outline, are: the Police Department's Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) program, a program designed to resolve neighborhood disputes over pets, a summer jobs program for at-risk youths, and one of the city's public-access television stations.
Hahn's budget planners have identified other services -- such as meals for homebound residents and hours at new libraries -- that could be trimmed if the city had to make deeper cuts.
"We all find this extremely painful," Hahn said Thursday. "But we just can't keep doing things the same old way.... We can't do everything. And we certainly cannot do everything next year that we've done in the past."
The mayor's office also has begun work on plans to eliminate about 1,000 jobs from the city payroll, mostly through attrition, early retirement and elimination of vacant positions, Liu said.
A sluggish local economy and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's plans to use millions of dollars in local property taxes to help balance the state budget have combined to push the city's budget far into the red this year.
To balance the budget, the mayor inaugurated an exhaustive new budgeting process this year designed to prioritize 1,400 city services.
