With Los Angeles beaten by several crises, Mayor Karen Bass promised on Monday in her speech on the city of the city to rebuild herself during a record clip following the fire of Palisades while overcoming disastrous financial misfortunes.
Bass, appearing at the Town Hall in front of an audience of around 250, took a tone full of hope, even if it recognized that the city is underlined on a variety of fronts: decline in cinematographic and televised production, an imminent trade war and an housing market which is inaccessible for many.
Faced with a budget deficit of nearly a billion dollars, Bass published a budget immediately after its speech which calls for the elimination of more than 2,700 jobs. According to managers of the city budget.
“I want to be entitled with you,” said Bass at some point, in remarks intended directly for city workers. “My proposed budget unfortunately includes layoffs, which is a decision of the last absolute appeal.”
Bass portrays her city as flexible and fierce enough to take the blows and bounce stronger.
The Los Angeles which resisted civilian disorders, recession, earthquakes, pandemics and fires “still increases,” she said in its address, which comes 104 days after a forest fire tore the Pacific palisades, killing 12 people and destroying thousands of houses.
Bass celebrated on Monday the speed of efforts to restore fires, saying that public services were restored in the Pacific palisades much faster than after the fires of previous California.
“We know faster than we can rebuild, the faster we can heal. We still have a long way to go. And for those who have lost a house, every day is a day too long,” said Bass.
She called on the municipal council to facilitate the reconstruction of residents by renouncing costs for the license and to verify the construction plans. The member of the Traci Park council, which represents the palisades, proposed such a policy in January, but the council awaits a report from several departments of the city on its feasibility.
Stuart Waldman, president of the Valley Industry and Commerce Assn., A group of companies from San Fernando Valley, said that he appreciated Bass’s remarks on rationalizing the city’s authorization processes.
At the same time, he criticized the city leaders their management of the budget, saying that they were too generous during the negotiation of wages for their workforce.
“They did it for themselves,” he said. “The city has concluded a bad deal with city employees to give them massive increases, and now it comes back to bite us.”
During his speech, the bass deceived the two -digit decreases of homicides and shots.
She also underlined the reduction in the roaming of the street last year, which dropped by more than 10%. The city has even more to go, she said, because public security finally depends on whether people feel safe where they live.
“The state of our city is as follows: homelessness is declining. The crime is broken,” said Bass. “These are difficult challenges, and they show that we can do much more.”
Bass used its address to call on owners to accept housing vouchers from homeless veterans. And she praised the non -profit mayor fund for Los Angeles for connecting Angelenos confronted with expulsion with resources to stay housed.
The mayor had also pointed to words on the decision of the County Supervisors of the County of Los Angeles to withdraw hundreds of millions of dollars from City-County Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority and to create his own agency, saying that “”The creation of a new bureaucracy is not in itself transformational. »»
Confronting homelessness is expensive, Bass said: “But leaving people on the street comes at a huge human cost”, not only affecting individuals living outside but also businesses and residents nearby.
“The cost of doing nothing is not only inhuman. He is also financially unbearable, ”she continued.
The annual address of the mayor intervened shortly before publishing his budget proposal for the financial year 2025-26, which presents discounts to a wide range of municipal agencies. These reductions are supposed to approach a budgetary crisis triggered by the spiral of legal payments, an economy of weakening and increasing personnel costs, which have been led to the fire by fires.
The mayor always hopes to avoid the reductions of staff by obtaining financial alleviation from Governor Gavin Newsom and the state legislature, or by persuading the unions of the city’s employees to make financial concessions. Success by one or the other road, however, is far from guaranteed.
“Cities like ours go through difficult economic moments across the country,” said Bass, explaining that it planned to operate the city more effectively by consolidating the departments and in reorganization.
Under its budget proposal, Bass would eliminate city commissions dealing with health, climate change and efficiency and innovation. It would also combine some of the smallest agencies in the city in a single entity.
Three departments – aging, development of young people and economic development and workforce – would be merged in the community of community investment for families.
Bass seeks to eliminate more than 1,000 “ghost” positions not fulfilled. She said that she had already postponed certain fixed assets and reduced the financing of the mayor’s office.
Bass also underlined the importance of bringing tourism to downtown Los Angeles and competing with entertainment jobs, after a huge exodus of filming in other cities and countries. She promised to facilitate the filming of the city’s property and to rationalize the city’s film license process.
For the bass, his speech focused on more than reassuring a disturbing population and workforce. Her political future has been at stake since the beginning of January, when the most expensive natural disaster in the modern history of Los Angeles broke out when she was around the world during a diplomatic trip to Ghana. Her initial response interrupted fires sparked a fierce criticism, and she argued with her then firefighters and her own recovery tsar.
Bass is in place for the report next year, and it is not difficult to know if someone will set up a serious challenge. However, his favorability ratings have seriously eroded in recent months. A recent survey by the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs revealed that almost half of the residents of the County Los Angeles had unfavorable views of the bass, against 32% last year.
She finished her speech by praising the 2028 Olympic Games, which Los Angeles is organizing, saying that the city owes the next generation to win on the world scene.
The municipal council has until the end of May to make changes to the mayor’s budget, then approve it. Until then, city officials should have a clearer idea to know if the state will come to the rescue.
“The speeches are great, but the details of the budget are better,” said the member of the Council Monica Rodriguez, who was strongly criticized Bass’s policies after the speech. “I think we know what are the priorities of this mayor when we examine the details of the budget, and whether or not it will be a city that maintains the interests of all Angelenos, or just a few.”
California Daily Newspapers
