The Broken City Syndrome
Village to Village by Paul Hatfield, January 25, 2010
We have all heard of the broken window syndrome. If you allow a seemingly inconsequential neighborhood problem to fester, it will start a chain reaction of other problems which lead to widespread blight. The broken window pane leads to graffiti, which leads to more vandalism and petty crime, which encourages gang activity…..
Los Angeles is operating under the broken city syndrome. We have the Mayor to thank for that. Perhaps he has become deluded by the budget surveys he foisted upon the public over the years. He has always pointed to the respondents’ selection of public safety as the top priority for the city.
The ten-thousand man police force has been his mantra. It is good publicity. People want more cops; he is willing to deliver, but at the expense of everything else. It does not matter if the city crumbles into dust from lack of maintenance. It is a great cover for his inability to manage the city. He sees more cops as the only way to salvage his rapidly diminishing political fortunes.
The Mayor wants you to think the choice is cops or services, two mutually exclusive alternatives in his mind. However, public safety is not just about putting cops on the street; it is about maintaining the city in a manner that discourages blight. Allowing potholes, graffiti, abandoned sofas, deteriorating properties, uplifted sidewalks, unlicensed street vendors, portable signs, poor planning, costly parking meters and a host of other negligent practices amount to a prescription for crime and decay.
He would rather continue to hire more police and gut other core services to head off bankruptcy.
It does not have to be that way.
But it will unless he is willing to renegotiate all union contracts – civilian and sworn – to achieve lower compensation costs. Believe me, compensation costs are the most critical component of the budget.
He does not have the courage to pressure his union allies. In five years, the Mayor has not shown any inclination to deal with compensation costs. We will have to compel him.
At a meeting of the Mayor’s Budget Advisory Committee, a group comprised of NC representatives, strategic recommendations were formulated to balance the budget for the both the short and long-term. If implemented, they might arrest the budget crisis without the consequences and cost of bankruptcy; without decimating many vital services, services that define the fundamental quality of life so necessary to deter crime and blight.
The recommendations will be unveiled prior to the City Council’s Budget and Finance Committee meeting at Van Nuys City Hall today, Monday, January 25th at 5:30 PM. Van Nuys City Hall is located at 14410 Sylvan Street, Van Nuys. The City Council meeting will begin at 6:00 PM.
The city is at a crossroads. The stakes are high – bankruptcy versus survival.
The message of the Budget Advisory committee is a financial Magna Carta. King Villaraigosa needs to be told he has neglected the needs of his subjects. He needs to do what is right for the citizens, not just his privileged supporters from organized labor.
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From: One of Professional City Employees
Subject: Structurally Dysfunctional City Budget
To me, the more I research, the more it is becoming apprent – that the solution to a Structurally Dysfunctional City Budget is not Either To RAID the Public Employee’s Earned by hard work Pension & Health Benefits – or the MILKING of our Tax Payers in order to continue to sustain this dysfunctional feeding to the deceased “bottomless bucket” of same either greed, ambitions or neglected inefficiencies.
We’ve got to end the Tug Of War between all the real stakeholders, equally been manipulated into sharing the role of being the “Targets” so the same for the same continues “To Do Business As Usual”.
This critical time is forcing us for a different type of opportunity for the 4 prongs of this system that has held our dysfunctional city by taking advantage of short term gains or short sightedness – to come to table, all clean & open and all at the same time to work together with spirit of cooperation in spite of the no longer working attitude of residual perceptions and out dated opinions of the past.
The 4 CRITICAL PPRONGS are:
1) City Management & Legislative body:
Mayor, Council[15], CAO, Chief Legislative Analyst, Controller, DA, all various Commission Boards & GM’s of operating departments
2) Business Community – Through BizFed & Various Chamber of Commerces
3) Public Tax Payers – Through NC’s & LANCC) Public Tax Payers – Through NC’s & LANCC
4) Public Sector Employees – through the Union Community
In this part of Civilized world – some of us need to RENEW our knowings of and about each other through open conversations while having the understanding there are varied point of views that combined would produce fundamental sustainable solution.
Resolving this City’s vast extent of systematic dysfunction necessitates that we efficiently utilize all of our resources of expertize from all the 4 prongs. Seasonal shifting of the burden of a dysfunction from one leg of the prong to another definitely ends with full collapse for the whole.