In the week of her annual State of the City address, in a season in which she must begin a re-election campaign for 2026, after easily the most trying three months of her long political career, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass must know the worst numbers she faces: Nearly half of Angelenos view her “unfavorably,” compared with fewer than a third of them just last year.
Those polling results from UCLA’s Luskin School of Public affairs tell the dismal story of the ongoing reverberations from her absence at the Jan. 7 windstorm and the ensuing devastation of the Palisades fire. Any mayor would have a hard time surviving the loss of one of her most powerful neighborhoods on her watch when she was not watching, not here to be the boss.
That said, the best way for Bass to give herself a chance next June is to respond with alacrity to the current crisis, which is by no means just L.A.’s worst-ever firestorm. Long-term, revenues and spending are way out of whack thanks to terrible decisions made in negotiating with employee unions, as well as huge hits from outrageous liability payouts. But in the right-now, the city’s operating budget is deeply in the red, approaching a billion dollars for this year, so that immediate steps must be taken to balance it.
And, to her credit, Bass’s proposed new budget released Monday cuts into the deficit the only way it quickly and efficiently can, by eliminating over 2,700 city jobs, about 1.650 of them through layoffs, and the rest by not hiring into currently vacant positions.
Not only that, she has to — any mayor would have to — propose adding dozens of new positions in the Fire Department, the only city department that would not face on the order of a 5% staff reduction. It matters little that failures in fighting the Palisades fire were more a matter of proper deployment of personnel the night it ignited. The fact is that the department relies on too much overtime, can use the extra staff — just as the city can get by with reductions to non-public safety departments. Bass and the council can fret that such layoffs should be a last resort given the city’s inability to fix sidewalks and fill potholes now.
But with union raises such as the SEIU’s recent bump of 22% in five years, they brought these layoffs, and this fiscal crisis, on themselves.
