Big wage hikes and fewer City Hall jobs in Los Angeles

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Los Angeles City Hall. (Photo by Hans Gutknecht, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)

It must be cold comfort to would-be job-seekers applying for the thousands of currently open positions in Los Angeles city government that the reason those opportunities are likely to be eliminated is the huge salary increases City Hall now plans to give those already employed by the city.

As David Zahniser of the Los Angeles Times reported this week, the city’s top financial analyst says that “the city’s general fund budget, which pays for basic services, currently has more than 2,100 unfilled civilian positions — both critical and non-critical.”

But because of agreements with the Los Angeles Police Department officers’ union and a union coalition of other city workers being considered by the City Council that would lead to an extraordinary set of seven raises over the next five years, unfilled jobs in the apparently non-critical sectors of city planning, park maintenance, engineering, upkeep of city buildings and youth development may well be on the chopping block, the financial analyst says.

Ours is not to lobby for more government jobs for their own sake — others do that all the time.

But there are real-world consequences for Angelenos who rely on city services when the council looks to make massively expensive deals with particular groups of the already employed.

That stunning deal would lead to raises of 24% between this coming April and July 2028 for thousands of Los Angeles city workers. It was a similar percentage of wage hikes for city workers — 24.5% over the seven years leading up to 2014 — that helped create the financial crisis inherited by former Mayor Eric Garcetti from former Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who later said he regretted agreeing to the raises.

In a Jan. 19 memo to the City Council, the analyst proposes “the elimination of all non-critical vacant positions.” Then: “the restructuring of services, programs, and/or other organizational components of the City that will be necessitated by the elimination of positions.” Of greatest concern to L.A. taxpayers is the final recommendation: “report on opportunities to update fees for service and other revenue enhancement opportunities including ballot measures.”

Guess whose revenues would be plundered, given those opportunities?

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