The latest community budget meeting was held at Bixby Park in the 2nd District with a large crowd that was both concerned and angry about the City Manager’s proposed budget for the 2013 fiscal year.

The meeting was held to specifically focus on the General Fund of the City, which accounts for 13% of the City’s $3 billion budget. The multiple community leaders and politicians in attendance—including Councilmembers Suja Lowenthal and Gary DeLong; City Manager Pat West; Director of Financial Management John Gross; LBFD Fire Chief Mike Duree; LBPD Bureau Chief Braden Phillips; Director of Parks, Recreation, and Marine George Chapjian —emphasized that they were there to address not necessarily ways of making more money appear but to find out what the community would like to keep most within the City’s limited budget.

Following eight years of budget cuts, amounting to $209 million in adjustments and a 25% decrease in the City’s workforce, the City and its citizens are facing extremely difficult times.

“Over the past eight years,” began Lowenthal, “we’ve been able to make cuts without having to cut services—it was a lot easier. Now we’re at the point that, without the mass revenue, it is extremely difficult to not cut some of those services. This is why most of you are here tonight.”

The City was grim albeit frank. We can’t grow money, they said, and cuts are bound to happen. But we’re not entirely set on what we’re cutting, so discuss with us what is most important to you so we can do our best to try and keep that aspect of your community alive.

City Manager Pat West addresses the audience.

Director of Financial Management John Gross addressed the structural issues we have within the City’s budget that are causing the severe economic problems. The structural problem is the fact that the City lacks an income which can cover its expenses. Gross often used home-based metaphors to explain. “Just like at home, you follow rules: you don’t spend more than you have,” he said. “To keep the budget for the upcoming year balanced, we have to take $17.2 million in cuts.”

Though many factors, such as pension costs and the two recessions that have occurred, have contributed to the budget fallout, Gross pinpoints the start in 2000—”The problems have really been around that long”—and informed the crowd that citizens themselves were the initial spark to the problem, having passed a 50% decrease in the Utility User Tax (UUT) from 10 percent to 5 percent. The move, made by Long Beach’s citizens to save themselves money, unfortunately removed some $40 million out of the budget.

Gross pointed out that, given property taxes, sales taxes and UUTs are the City’s main revenue sources—and each of these tax sources have faced either slow growth (property, sales) or simply trended down (UUT)—it was clear that this would not be solved in one fell swoop. Even with a balanced budget for this year with the proposed $17.2 million cut, the following two years still have projected shortfalls thanks to lack of revenue, wage and benefits increases, and an assortment of other costs, totaling up to $10.9 million in FY2014 and $6.4 million in FY2015.

“We are a service oriented company—and those services are provided by people,” stated Gross. “We can’t get them at lower costs in nations such as China or India—we have to buy those services here and they make up almost 80% of the budget… We have to face a new economic reality.”

That new reality involves not only one of the most progressive programs that incentivizes departments to save money and penalizes them for spending more, it also keeps public safety as its highest priority. This ultimately amounts to the fact that, though public safety is not entirely exempt from reductions, recreational and public services outside of safety are the first to face major cuts or decreases in operation.

This, of course, was not entirely met with nodding heads.

Several children even took to the mic, citing the fact that the families that use the programs and parks “aren’t the richest people in the world,” “come from single mother homes,” and use the park as their form of family, with one girl immediately choking up in fear that she’ll have nowhere to turn.

“Councilmember DeLong and I,” Lowenthal explained, “are going to restore some of the funding to the kids’ programs. We don’t know if it’s 100 percent or 90 percent or 80 percent—we’re not sure, so you need to inform us of what is most important to you.”

Assistant Principal and LBUSD Administrator Dr. Roshann Williams proposed a collaboration between the schools and parks in order to reduce the costs. “I know it’s difficult; I know everyone wants their piece of the pie but I just want to make sure we’re all aware… Is there some type of way we can create a collaboration between the schools and parks? Maybe we can do this together.”

Assistant Principal Dr. Roshann Williams speaks out on creating a collaboration between schools and parks.

Senior citizens, accounting for a heavy portion of those speaking out since 90 percent of the Senior Center’s staff and programs are proposed to be cut, were vitriolic in their criticism.

“In Japan, senior citizens are considered national treasures,” stated one woman. “In the United States, we’re national trash. The Senior Center is the one place we can go… You want to eliminate 90 percent of our staff and programs? You want to cancel our events and trips and seminars? You want to eliminate our medical care, our health classes, our computer classes? You want to eliminate our food bank? You want to eliminate us.”

Not all were angry or emotionally driven—and took Lowenthal’s suggestion of specifics directly. Teenager Mark Mueller was eloquent and rational in his plea to somehow balance the cut of park employees with accessibility by installing more lights in the skate park to provide a safer place for kids even without supervision.

“If there are no youth programs and there’s nowhere to go, they’re going to go home and just watch TV or play video games or—the worse—get involved in crime or gang activity. But if there’s at least lights til 9 or 10, especially in the winter, they at least have a place to go to, to get rid of their energy, to keep busy.”

Whether strides were made in bridging the community and the City is arguable, though the discussion has at least been initiated. While the proposed budget is structurally balanced and maintains the City’s current year priorities, the City Council will still have to determine what changes they will officially make to the budget in September.