When the Mayor and City Manager presented the newest version of the Fiscal Year 2010 City Budget on Thursday, it brought to reality a notion that we were all expecting but perhaps underestimated: Long Beach is in bad shape. Before Thursday, that was a reality reinforced by statistics. Today, it’s taken form as a series of cuts that may affect the way we live for years to come.
To present a balanced budget to the City Council on or before September 15, drastic measures will be taken in order to cover a $38 million deficit: fewer community programs, longer waiting lines, higher fees, and hundreds of jobs potentially eliminated (including up to 38 Police officers and 23 firefighters). It’s a sobering list of reminders of the very real effects behind the grumblings that have been awaiting this moment for the past year or more. “The budget is bad this year,” is finally more than an oft-used phrase; it’s reality, with real effects on real people. And that’s the best-case scenario.
In its worst form – that’s if negotiations to eliminate $18 million in employee contributions don’t go as planned, the economy worsens or the State grabs more city funding – we can expect 21 furlough days for all City employees, a freeze on negotiated salary increases, and further cuts to police, fire, library hours, parks, youth services and street maintenance. Mind you, these are last-resort tactics that City manager Pat West himself called “fairly Draconian and drastic,” but he’s planned for them nonetheless, just in case.
Some would say – and I say suspect, will say in our Comments section – that furlough days and salary freezes should be implemented, regardless. They’re neither right nor wrong, but it would seem to make more sense than cutting services to the people who pay their salaries. Furlough days and salary freezes may affect hundreds of City employees, but the alternative – cutting public services to the bone – will certainly affect tens, maybe hundreds of thousands.
Of course, not all City employees are to blame for Long Beach’s financial troubles, and the faltering economy surely lent a strong hand to Long Beach’s deficit, but the people who most definitely are not at fault are the taxpaying public – so why strike the City services that they depend on most? The money they’ve contributed to the pot is being used to fill a gigantic pit, a metaphor that is no longer figurative as taxes have never been higher and services will soon reach a new low.
The good news, though, is that there is good news at all. The City saved itself from an $8 million loss when it prevented the State from taking its Gas Tax profits, and can borrow to replace $10 million in Prop 1A funds that the State will take (although that must be paid back with interest). The City also dodged a bullet by saving $5 million, when the median employee salary agreement its bound to fell.
But these three positives and a small handful of others amount to mere pittance compared to the avalanche of negatives in this Budget. The worst part is that we’re probably not through the worst of it; Long Beach can expect deficits of $11.5 million in 2011 and as much as $40 million in 2012, and all the cost-saving and penny-pinching going on now will not affect those totals. The 2010 cuts and layoffs cannot sustain us through those times, we will need more of both just to break even. It’s going to get worse.
But this is the Long Beach we now live in, one of fiscal uncertainty that no longer manifests itself in the form of pie charts and graphs, but police officers, park hours and potholes.