City Council Faces Tough Decisions to Balance Budget

The next month promises to be a contentious one for City Council members as they pick their way through a thicket of thorny budget decisions.

To balance the budget in a year of recession and declining city income, city management has offered the mayor and council the choice of hacking a broad swath through city services in the form of $24 million in cuts in police, fire, library, parks and public-works spending or increasing a variety of fees and taxes, including the local utility tax, garbage collection and business-license fees, natural gas rates and real estate transfer taxes.

Saying that most of the cuts are unacceptable, Mayor Ernie Kell this week endorsed many of the fee and tax increases. Now it’s up to the council, which seems anything but certain about what to do.

“I don’t know what is going to happen,” Councilman Les Robbins admitted. But, he continued, “I do not see Ernie’s budget (passing) unanimously. Who wants to run for reelection on tax increases? You’ve got four councilmen running for reelection next year.”

Councilman Warren Harwood, who has clashed frequently with Kell in recent months, blasted the mayor’s tax proposals.

“He’s hitting the middle-income taxpayer and the retiree. . . . We have an inequitable tax structure, and he’s preserving it,” Harwood charged, repeating his call for new fees on shippers and tenants in the city’s profitable port. “He’s unwilling to charge big shippers who are doing $40 million in business a year.”

Harwood has argued since the beginning of the year that the council should go through the city’s budget, line by line, to find savings. He complained that the budget options presented to the council last week by the mayor were only “Doomsday or business as usual. I’d like to see some steps in between.”

Councilman Douglas Drummond rejected many of the proposed service cuts and predicted that the council will ultimately settle on a package of cuts and tax increases. “I have no interest in reductions in service that would affect crime or fire or youth services or the library,” he said.

Councilman Ray Grabinski also doubted that many of the sharpest cuts would be adopted. “I think I have some other things I want to look into, and I think my colleagues do, too,” Grabinski said, declining to elaborate.

Privately, some council members said Long Beach’s financial woes are likely to stir interest in raising port fees and replacing the local Police Department with contract coverage by the Sheriff’s Department.

But movement on either issue would likely be too slow to influence this year’s budget deliberations. Kell has made it clear that he strongly opposes higher port fees, and the police issue is a highly political one.

City Manager James C. Hankla has recommended a $1.6-billion budget for the coming fiscal year--12% lower than this year’s. Much of that budget includes self-supporting departments, such as the harbor, over which the council has no control. The General Fund, which pays for basic city services such as police and fire and which the council does control, would be $282 million, or 1.7% less than this year. But the budgets of many city departments included in the General Fund have been effectively cut by 10%, since they have had to reduce spending while also absorbing pay increases mandated by union agreements.

(Southeast Edition) NEXT STEP

The nine-member City Council has scheduled four public hearings on the budget on successive Tuesdays: May 21, from 2 p.m. to 7 p.m.; May 28, from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m.; June 4 from 2 p.m. to 7 p.m., and June 11 from 2 p.m. to 7 p.m. The hearings will be in council chambers in City Hall. The council must approve the budget by July 1, the start of the new fiscal year.