How to Cut the City Budget
Greg Nelson writing at LA City Watch covers the growing city budget deficit and comes up with some interesting ideas on how to streamline city expenses.- Eliminate the five Board of Public Works positions; saving over $500,000.
- Sell the workers’ comp system
- Consolidate city and county elections
- Reduce City Council budgets- Nelson notes that the size of Council staffs in the nation’s largest cities is about one-third that of Los Angeles’.
- Voluntary privatization- Teams of city employees may be able to perform certain services more efficiently and at less cost if they could escape the city’s suffocating bureaucracy.
- Sell bonds on the Internet
- Consolidate the meter readers- Why doesn’t DWP contract with The Gas Company to read the electric meters? Or better yet, install WiFi devices to the meters so that no one has to go into the field.
- Create a special DWP rate for city government- The City owns DWP but it pays them from the General Fund for power and water use, which doesn’t make any sense.
- Rental monkeys at the LA Zoo
- Rental monkeys pen
- Annual subsidies for real estate developers including over $200 million for the Grand Avenue and LA Live developers alone
- An elephant pen for two elephants at the LA Zoo
- Questionable "anti-gang"programs
Moore's entire Spreadsheet of Shame details nearly $2 billion in city budget savings by eliminating costly, ridiculous and unneeded government programs.
Keep that in mind the next time a politician tells you we have to increase taxes.
Labels: city budget, greg nelson
Posted by Mayor Sam @ 3/09/2008 12:54:00 AM
10 Comments:
Privatizing airports. Eg. at O'Hare Chicago, gives the city millions in revenue without the direct oversight.
OH, they don't have a "sanctuary city" nor a stranglehold by the unions, either -- which overlap, since our illegals are pretty fesity and demand more than citizens in Chicago or elsewhwere.
Last year the Daily News reported that DWP had over $100 MILLION IN OVERTIME. Not one knuckle head in council said a word about it and it seemed to just go away. Why didn't the reporters keep that story alive??? One of them should investigate and check to see if they are still having that type of massive overtime now.
Nelson says City should get even more of a break from DWP? In case he hasn't noticed .....
http://ladailyblog.blogspot.com/2008/03/villaraigosa-dwp-rate-increase-memo-to.html
Rate hikes or taxes, the money goes to the general fund and highest paid union workers in the state, but there is not enough for maintenance. The money teat has been pulled for so long crappy service is being noticed. DWP uses bad management as the excuse for inflationary rate increases. Will the council go along?
GET RID OF ALL THE WORTHLESS NEIGHBORHOOD COUNCILS AND DONE. LOOK AT THE GLASSELL PARK NEIGHBORHOOD COUNCIL. WHAT A JOKE!
http://youtube.com/watch?v=2Vksoxz4oIM
'DWP had over $100 MILLION IN OVERTIME.'
It takles six men to dig one hole, another six to close it and three supervisors to check it. Six months later they open the same hole as they forgot something. Their project managers suck!!
Privatizing LAX would indeed provide revenue without allowing oversight. So if you think the LAX neighbors are pissed now, just wait til they have to deal with a private airport that can do what it wants while City Hall is powerless to do anything about it. Yeah, that'll work in modern-day L.A.!
The way it is now, at least the communities have some ability to engage on the issues and impact decisions. They may not get everything they want, but they do better than they give themselves credit for.
"Villaraigosa's airfare and hotels per year $200,000."
This amount is misstated for last year. The actual amount was one-quarter of a million dollars. Compare this amount with the $25,200 travel budget of the Hahn administration.
How about we stop spending $6 million a year to truck garbage to Corona?
Get rid of the CAO office. They do nothing except bog down an already bogged down bureaucracy.
the real sham is the millions spent on lawsuits within LAFD and LAPD as well as Street services. if we had an aggressive city attny more concerned about protecting what is the city interest instead of his own political career maybe we as city wouldn't settle on every bogus lawsuit filed against los angeles.
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