LA City Council votes to save 1,000 jobs from cuts as budget uncertainty still looms

LOS ANGELES (KABC) -- With the City of Los Angeles facing a nearly $1 billion budget deficit, Mayor Karen Bass had proposed as many as 1,650 layoffs. However, the city's budget committee has found ways to cut that number by 1,000, down to 650.

"What we're focused on is making sure that the city works. When people experience living in Los Angeles, it's clean, it's safe, the lights are on, trees are trimmed, sidewalks are repaired. We're far from that as a city generally, but we would have moved even further away from that had we not restored a lot of these core city services," said L.A. City Councilwoman and chair of the budget committee Katy Yaroslavsky.

The jobs were saved thanks to moving some positions out of being paid for under the general fund, doubling up in hotel rooms for the mayor's Inside Safe homeless program, and lowering the number of sworn officers in LAPD -- something Bass has issues with.

"I'm not supportive of that change, that's for sure," Bass said. "The change to the sworn officers, because I'm concerned that we don't have enough sworn officers as it is, and as you know, I have certainly been on an effort to get officers hired."

But, the budget committee says LAPD can't afford to lose over 400 civilian jobs, so they're bringing back 150 of those jobs that support investigations and crime-solving.

"These specialized folks that you can't backfill with sworn LAPD, even if you could, they're not the right skill set. We made sure to preserve those and build those back into the budget," Yaroslavsky said. "You can't have a functioning police department without people doing that work. Nobody wants to cut sworn hiring. I would love to see the numbers go up. But, if you're going to use sworn to backfill all these civilians, then those folks are not on the street."

The union representing L.A.'s firefighters has raised some concerns. In a letter, UFLAC said, in part, "We understand that the City of Los Angeles is in a budget crisis, but there should be no greater priority in the city's budget than the life-saving work of the LAFD... The mayor's proposed budget took positive steps in the right direction toward funding your LAFD. We're asking you and the members of the B&F committee to keep this funding intact and to not cut the proposed budget."

"We shouldn't be creating new programs at the expense of existing core city services, right? So we made sure the fire department has what they need," Yaroslavsky said. "They're still getting a $50 million increase in their year-over-year budget, they're going to be getting new fire trucks, new fire helicopters. They're going to have additional mechanics."

City leaders say they hope to get the number of layoffs down to zero, and Mayor Bass insists the budget deficit won't impact recovery efforts in Pacific Palisades.

"There's no particular impediment that is being caused to rebuilding in the Palisades because of our budget issues," Bass said.

In Pacific Palisades, the Lopes family is on their way to rebuilding their home that burned in the fire. They say the City of Los Angeles has been helpful in speeding up the permitting process and cutting red tape.

But, Yaroslavsky says one thing the Palisades Fire has caused for this year and future budgets is uncertainty.

"It put a lot of pressure on the budget in the sense that we have a lot of potential liabilities. We have a lot of costs associated with rebuilding -- some of which will be reimbursed by FEMA, some of which won't. Some of which we thought would be reimbursed by the state, but now we're hearing it might not be," Yaroslavsky said.