Antonio Villaraigosa: I don't take these decisions lightly.... In no small part I think all of us kind of look in the mirror and feel good or not feel good about the person we seen in the mirror in no small part because of the jobs we have. So laying people off is not something I do lightly, it's not something I relish. In fact, I haven't used that word previously, but it pains me greatly to lay one person off. And I've said that I intend to think of every person that I lay off as possibly a single mom with three kids, one of whom may have health needs and need health insurance. I also didn't say, but I will say here -- I mean look, we've had a structural deficit since 1997 every year. I reduced that by 97 million my first year, and I think a hundred and some odd million the second year, and then the fact is I've contributed -- I'm part of the problem, I'm not here to point fingers at anybody, notwithstanding the fact that I think some people feel, and you guys love the battle between the mayor and the council. I'm not looking for a battle with anybody, neither the council nor our labor partners. I certainly acknowledge the work that our employees do ... and I get to see them up close in a way that a lot of you don't. You know, when those fires and those floods, you know, we got -- it's not just the police officers and the firefighters that are the best anywhere.... Our engineers and our architects, we have talented people who are librarians.
Antonio Villaraigosa on L.A.'s budget woes
PRIMARY SOURCE
The mayor discusses layoffs, public safety and more with Times editors and reporters.
So these decisions aren't made lightly, they're not made because of some philosophical bent or ideological desire to reduce the size of government; they're made simply because we cannot sustain the size of our workforce, the cost of our payroll and pensions, and if we don't move quickly and decisively to identify new revenue options, to make these cuts and layoffs that are without question going to be part of the equation here, we will only put ourselves in a more serious financial predicament than we are in currently.
So with that I'll be more than happy to answer your questions. The one thing -- and you can put that on the record -- I push back. I think you all know that I'm not a guy who -- you know, I push back. You all have a right to ask your questions, and I have a right to push back, and I do. So with that caveat in mind, ask your questions....
Nick Goldberg, L.A. Times: Let me start this out by asking you a little bit about how you're going to get that done. I mean, last year, as I understand it, you guys went in and arranged an early retirement deal, and my understanding is that it took so long to work it out, it took so long to get the program underway that a lot of savings were lost. What can you do? ... What are you going to do this year? How are we going to get this done? What's going to keep the dickering and bickering from holding this off?
Villaraigosa: You can write whatever you want here, and again, I'm not going to go off the record because I'm just going to say what -- I hope you don't put too much of the strategy in there, but you guys write whatever, I'm not going to tell you not to -- but look: I negotiated the early retirement program. CAO comes in, he tells me, "This doesn't cost out. What are you doing? You gotta kill it." I did; he then negotiated the early retirement. He comes back to me; I said, "Hey, you're the one who told me mine was no good. What, yours isn't much better." I said I'd veto it, if you remember, he had to make $78 million in concessions, they had to go to 7%. All of that, while it was important to do, and you editorialized that it's important to remove as many of these people as humanely as possible, it also had to pay for itself. And as you know, all we paid for was the incremental cost. It is more expensive to ERIP than to lay off.
So while we did that once, and we may even do that for the other 360 employees if they pay the incremental cost, and right now they're saying they won't pay the incremental cost, what we're saying is, we can't keep ERIPing here. The fact is we can't afford that either.... I want to do this humanely, but I also -- there is a bottom line here. So it took us way too long.
