You're listening to KFI AM six forty on demand.
KFI AM six forty live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. This is Michael Monks Reports. I'm Michael Monks from KFI News. We're with you tonight till nine o'clock on this beautiful first Saturday of Spring here in southern California. But we got some hot days ahead, way hotter than usual. Highs in the eighties on Monday and Tuesday around Metro La. Upper eighties, mid nineties in the San Gabriel Valley and the Anelope Valley, around ninety in the San Fernando Valley.
In the Santa Clarita Valley, we'll see the mid eighties and the Santa Monica Mountains. Eighties inland Oc. I gotta get a place on the coast. It's seventy three, maybe seventy five at the beaches on Monday and Tuesday, so it's gonna feel like July everywhere else. But it is March, and the madness is here. Some teams already punch their ticket to the Sweet sixteen Michigan, Texas Tech, Arkansas Purdue. We're keeping an eye on this UCLA game right now.
The Bruins are up eight to seven over Tennessee. Seated UCLA second seed to Tennessee. They've tipped off in Lexington, Kentucky, a little over fifteen minutes in the first half.
There.
We'll keep an eye on that game. My bracket was off to a good start. I've not done well today, though. How's your bracket? Have you been doing some cussing over it? I'll tell you where you'll need to be watching your mouth, and that is LA City Hall. Seven city council members have filed a motion to stop two words from being used during public comment periods. If you've ever watched a city council meeting in Los Angeles, you know the public
comments are a vile display profanity, racism, sexism. It's the only time you might feel deep sympathy for a politician. Some of these speakers are regulars, they're at every meeting, including committee meetings, but they could be limited on what they say going forward. Listen to what the two words up for banning are. The N word and the C word. They are routinely hurled at LA City Hall at our elected officials, and those are, of course bad words. They're
not the only bad words, but right now. This motion specifically targets those two words. We're going to go deeper into that next week. I'll have plenty of examples of these virable public comments, obviously with the edit button used frequently. But this story came down late Friday, so we'll gather some more details and see how that proceeds this week at city Hall in the coming week. But city Hall is an appropriate place to be using other bad words.
I can tell you that the same way you might exclaim some profanities when maybe you open up a bill that's a billion times larger than you expected. If you haven't heard, the City of la is facing a one billion dollar budget deficit just in time to put a new budget together. So how does that happen? Well, As kfi's intrepid city Hall reporter, I'd like to put it into some context for you this hour. And first, I want to play a clip from a city council meeting just this week.
This is on Tuesday.
It may not sound that important, but I want you to listen because this is a theme that has played out all fiscal year.
Yes, sir, thank you for item thirty two in the case entitled Adam Hollins versus City of Los Angeles at all, there's a recommendation to expand up to six hundred seventy five thousand dollars in settlement. For item thirty three in the case entitle Stephanie Hernandez versus City of Los Angeles, that's all, there's a recommendation to expand up to two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in six seventy five thirty four is in the case entitled Margarito ti Lopez AT's
all versus the City of Los Angeles. That's all. There's a recommendation to expand up to eight million dollars million. For item thirty five in the case entitle Andrea Are not to burn versus City of Los Angeles, that's all, there's a recomvation to expend up to ninety five thousand dollars in settlement. And for item thirty six in the case entitled d'Artagnan Wallace versus City of Los Angeles, it's tall, there's a recomvation to expend up to one hundred thousand dollars in settlement.
So there you go.
Just those items are now before us.
Here they go listen to this close the role tabulate the vote.
Twelve eyes, twelve eyes, just like that one fell swoop, no comments from any council members. They've approved more than nine million dollars of your money to be paid in legal settlements from people who have sued the city. Now, the bulk of that was one obviously, eight million dollars is the bulk of all of those. But it is routine to hear these settlements every week, coming down two fifty here, five hundred there, one point five here, a
six million there. The city is hundreds of millions of dollars over budget this fiscal year in legal settlements alone. They are down with their sales revenue, they are down with their hotel tax, they are on with their business tax, they are down with their property tax. And by the way, one of their fancier neighborhoods burned at the ground in January. So that's how you add it up to about a
billion dollars. There was a budget committee meeting right after that City council meeting, and there were twenty eight more lawsuits on the agenda to consider, so those will make their way to city council at some point for a full vote as well. The way it works is that, you know, the lawyers work out the deals and then they bring it to the Budget Committee for consideration. They usually meet behind closed doors in a closed session, and then they decide at council whether they will pay it.
And typically the council president will ask the budget committee chairperson, is there anything we need to know? They usually say no, it's okay, We've gone through these, go ahead and vote on them, and that's it. More millions of your dollars are paid out. Now, Look, these are legal settlements. They've made their way through the court system. We can't dispute that somebody has claimed that they were wronged or that
they hurt themselves. That eight million dollar lawsuit you heard was on behalf of a family who had a loved one killed by police and it was determined to be unjustified and that cost eight million dollars. We're going to spend this hour talking about how the city got here, and the mayor has come out with I guess the first page of a PowerPoint presentation on how we're going to address this, and I'm not sure that there's a lot of stock that we can put into that yet.
Because I revisited her budget proposal from a year ago and pulled some comments and I'll want you to hear those to see how much trust we can put into that. The city Controller, Kenneth Mahea, he's all over this and this is what he told city council just this week when.
It comes to the city's budget.
We know we're in a structural deficit.
But how did we get here.
You know we didn't get here.
We didn't have a COVID or global recession.
This is something happening from the inside.
It's coming from inside the house. I hate to be a guy since I told you so. I had Kenneth Mahia on this very program back in the fall. I had him on again a few weeks ago. I can't believe that this hasn't been front page news for months and months and months that the city was going broke. I'm harping on it constantly. It's shocking how much money is flying out of that building. That's why I hope
you continue to listen to KFI AM six forty. It's what we've been talking about for months, and we're gonna dig into it deep again. This budget as proposed by Mayor Bass, it wasn't all rosy, but it wasn't supposed to end up like this, So we're going to talk more about all of that on Michael Monks Reports.
You're listening to KFI AM six forty on demand.
KFI AM six forty live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. Bruins down three right now to Tennessee and Lexington. Here in the second round of the NCAA Tournament. Ruins at the line, see if they can cut into that score with a trip to the sweet sixteen on the line. Like so many of you, I just pulled up that bald eagle cam and big bear. I've been a little cynical about all of it, and I apologize, but it is quite lovely this evening. There's a beautiful little eaglet sleeping.
You can see his little belly moving up and down. One of the parent eagles roosting, watching over the scenery, making sure there is no danger. As always, there's a pile of carnage off to the side. Bloody fish, some other furry animal that used to be living a fine life until he was caught in these talons and brought up to be eglet feed. Question for all of you
eagle lovers out there, this crossed the wires. Today, a pet bird died and some others were injured during a shed fire and attic fire in the back of a house, and Van.
Nys see a bunch of tweets or tiktoks about this pet.
Bird was all there was on social media when we lost this poor eaglet last week.
Hypocrites, all of you.
There are more important things happening, of course, namely at Los Angeles City Hall, where I mean, for the first time, it felt like the seriousness of the situation was at least being presented to the city government. Now there were no actions taken, There weren't a lot of comments from your elected officials about the seriousness the gravity of the situation.
But on two different days you had the City Controller's office deliver a presentation to the City Council, and the next day you had the city administrator basically read the obituary for the current fiscal year budget. I want you to first hear from Rick Cole, he works in the City Controller's office, laying out just how daunting of a task is ahead for the City of Los Angeles.
This is a multi year challenge and it's a fiscal crisis. We're not alone. San Francisco is facing big shortfalls. San Diego is, but this is a fiscal crisis, and therefore it's important to recognize that all of the wisdom is not within the walls of city Hall, really the forty
four departments other cities. There's a mentality in Los Angeles that says we can only learn from giant cities, and there's only two other giant cities, and they are so different from Chicago and New York that we can't learn anything from them. They have a different form of government, they have different demographics, they have different weather, And then we can't learn from smaller cities because they're smaller than us.
And the reality is is that Los Angeles has struggled since the early nineties with finances, and it is important and not only learn from other cities, but from the private sector, from the nonprofit sector, from academics, and to think fresh about the future. This city is one of the most dynamic, diverse, and rich in talent cities on the planet, and we're going to have to draw upon that talent, that brain power, and that commitment from the
stakeholders that the Controller has talked about. We've got to enlist labor. We've got to enlist business, We've got to enlist the nonprofit sector. We've got to most of all, enlist the people of Los Angeles in owning this problem and helping solve it.
So it's all hands on deck from the City Controller's office. Everybody needs to get involved because the financial situation is so bleak in the City of Los Angeles.
Now.
I want you to think about the city. If you're listening in San Bernardino, if you're listening in Riverside, if you're up in a Thousand Oaks, if you're in San Clemente, if you're an unincorporated La County, what's happening at Los Angeles City Hall could impact the entirety of Southern California. You've got to be honest, regardless of what you think
about the politics or the homeless situation. It's the place, it's the most important place in Southern California, and it is in serious trouble, far more serious than we thought four months ago. And we thought it was pretty serious then, but it's only gotten worse. And if like me, you live in the City of Los Angeles and you look around and you see crumbling sidewalks, damaged streets, overgrown trees, graffiti everywhere, trash everywhere, Parks that you cannot use because
they've been overrun by camps. And you think, what am I paying for? This is bad news because what you're paying for when you think about your neighborhood is what will be on the chomping block. First, City Administrator Matt Zabo also spoke to city council this week and finally there was some feeling of gravity in the room.
That this is bad. This is what he told the city council.
Therefore, the gap between anticipated revenues and planned expenditures for fiscal year twenty five twenty six is nearly one billion.
Dollars a billion dollars.
The proposed budget the mayor will deliver to this council in just over a month from today will close that gap, but it will require extremely difficult cost cutting decisions. The severity of the revenue decline paired with rising costs, has created a budget gap that may layoffs nearly inevitable. We are not looking at dozens or even hundreds.
Of layoffs, but thousands.
Well.
Layoffs may be necessary. It cannot and will not be the only solution, and I can tell you that the mayor is absolutely committed to preserving as many jobs in city services as possible as we face these economic headwinds.
That is City Administrator Matt Zabo telling the city council that you have spent too much and we have not brought in enough revenue, and now, as he said, not dozens, not hundreds, but thousands of layoffs are possible. He also mentioned services that the mayor is committed to preserving services as much as she can. So think about layoffs in
the public sector here. This isn't going to be faceless bureaucrats the way that you can brush off any cuts you've heard Doze doing out of Washington, Because it's probably not going to be police officers. It's probably not going to be the fire department, not after the political storm that we've been dealing with after the fires. So who are the people who will be on the chopping block should it come to this, and it looks like it will.
The street sweepers, the animal shelter workers, the people who might wipe the occasional graffiti off of a downtown building, the people that you interact with as a citizen, the people whose services you rely on every day. And if you think service is bad now, this news is only going to make it worse.
This is bad.
Now.
You heard Matt and Zabo say that the mayor is committed to limiting the layoffs preserving services as much as she can. And it is true that Mayor Bass has released a few bullet points about what the plan is.
We'll dive into those, but I'm also going to bring to your attention some of her comments from about one year ago when she was releasing this very budget that is now a billion dollars short, and we will compare what she said then to what we're dealing with now and put that into the context of whether we should feel good about what this plan is coming from the mayor. We're not just going to hear from the mayor. I
want to hear from you too. You can always join our conversation here by opening up the iHeartRadio app, click on that talkback button, and we will play some of your comments. Why do you think we are in the financial mess in Los Angeles that we are?
What do we need to do? Are you a.
Resident of LA and are you concerned about potential service cuts and layoffs? Join our conversation that way, The Mayor's plan preview is coming up next here on Michael Monks Reports.
You're listening to KFI AM six forty on demand.
KFI AM six forty live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. We're notted up, We're tied UCLA twenty three, Tennessee twenty three. The spot in the sweet sixteen on the line there will keep you posted as that goes on. In the meantime, bigger fish to fry right here in LA with a billion dollar budget shortfall looming, just in time to craft next year's budget. Now, the way the budget works in the City of Los Angeles is the mayor creates a budget.
This is the mayor's proposed budget.
She's supposed to announce that next month, and then it goes to city Council and there is a committee of special hearings and all that.
All the departments are paraded through.
They make their case for how much money they need, which positions they should keep, and then the public gets the weigh in, and ultimately council will adopt a budget. The mayor is obviously aware now of I guess she got the text messages about the fiscal crisis and she sent out an image on her social media a New way of Budgeting. It's titled Mayor Bass has directed city officials to provide proposals in order to move the city forward. Keep in mind, this budget is supposed to come out
in a few weeks. She has now directed city officials to provide proposals in order to move the city forward. I want to talk about the six bullet points that she included, and then we're going to revisit her comments from a year ago when she released the budget that is now a billion dollars short. Priority Number one reduced
liability costs. If you were listening at the top of the show, I played a clip from this week's city council meeting where they just vote for almost nine million dollars I think more than nine million dollars in lawsuit settlements, and the next day had twenty eight more on a committee agenda that will eventually make its way to a full vote. Hundreds of millions of dollars over budget and liability costs just this fiscal year.
Since July.
She says she wants to restructure departments and reassign city services to refocus the city's work on its most critical services. If you want to translate that, open up the iHeartMedia app, iHeartRadio app, sorry, and click on the talkback button. We're going to play some of those messages throughout the show. I want to hear your perspective as well on LA's financial situation. Step number three reduced departmental contract expenses. Step four.
This is some wording that we need to pay attention to realize payroll.
And benefit savings.
That might be a fancy way of saying layoffs, but you also have to keep in mind there are public employees in the city who are in unions. Then they have contracts those may need to be renegotiated. There are some of those unionized public employees who are due to receive raises before this fiscal year is over. Will that be postponed? Step five is to preserve our reserve fund.
The way the city council likes to set up a budget, I should say, the city administrator says five percent of the city's eight billion dollar budget should be in the reserve, and once it dips below five percent, they get a little nervous. Once it dips below three percent, they get really nervous. It's below two and a half percent, right, now, so they want to find a way to put more
money into that. And the six point is to create structural reforms to enable ongoing budget balance in future fiscal years. So she has directed city officials to provide proposals on those six items. Hopefully those come in in time before her budget is released in April, and we will be there at that unveiling and we'll be talking about that now.
A year ago, I was at City Hall when Mayor bas announced this budget, and I've got a few clips that I pulled from that press conference that I'd like to play for you, and we'll start with the first one.
Now.
In the coming years, we know that we will face challenging times amid national, state and local economic uncertainty driven by broad economic trends and the coming national election. This budget continues our momentum toward change by prioritizing city services core city services, but using this as an opportunity as a reset, so that our budgets moving forward are more honest, transparent, and more focused on getting the job done for Angelino's.
So, a year ago, the budget presented was supposed to be a reset, and she knew then that things were a little weird and the country as it relates to the economy. It's been a little uncertain. It's only gotten more so recently. Those were her remarks at city Hall for what her goals were with the budget, and in this next clip we'll hear her talk about ethical governance.
Budget also invests in increased ethical governance and ensures the city he remains prepared to endure any uncertainties in the year ahead. We made difficult decisions in the process. One example is my own office budget is taking a ten percent cut. But we have learned that LA needs to change the way it budgets so that it is honest, transparent and delivers on the people's business. This is something
the city Controller pointed out. And as soon as this budget assigned, we plan to really use this opportunity to make a strategic analysis, a comprehensive analysis of all city departments.
So there she is saying that the budget she presented last year was supposed to be prepared for the uncertainty, and now that we are a billion dollars short. How would you grade that? iHeartRadio out. Click on that talkback button will play your messages as well. There's one last clip I want to play for you, and let's just hear it and I'll talk about it.
We will begin preparing for next year's budget immediately after this year's budget assign so we can take advantage of these tough times to determine how departments can function in a more efficient and effective manner. And because we are expecting difficult times ahead, we are proactively creating a unit in the CEO's office to pursue grants that will help
address these issues. One thing I learned in the years I spent in Congress was that Los Angeles leaves dollars on the table, and we're going to make sure that every dollar that could possibly come to LA, either from the public or private sector, we are able to capture.
So the city last year was creating a budget that would be prepared for financial trouble in the fiscal year ahead, and then would immediately also start working on the budget that's supposed to be presented next month. And here we are a month out and the mayor says she has now directed city officials to provide proposals in order to
fix this crisis. So it doesn't appear that the current budget was prepared as well as it should be for the uncertainty, and it doesn't appear that there was a lot of work done ahead of time on the budget that is supposed to be released next month. This is a very serious crisis and it will affect you, especially if you live in the city of Los Angeles. Keep in mind, this is a city that has some big events coming up, you know, the Olympics. How are we going to throw a party like that with no money.
We're going to talk about the Olympics in the next hour because our LA twenty eight committee folks were over in Greece presenting to the International Olympic Committee about where we stand, and they talk a bit about recovering from the wildfires and all that, but also how we'll be dealing with our traffic and the investments that the region has been making in Metro for example. It's gonna cost money.
It doesn't look like we're gonna have any We're gonna continue to follow this just like we do every day here KFI Am six forty, and we'll take your comments as well on the iHeartRadio app. Click on the talkback button. We'll play some of those messages coming up next. There's one way that the city should be making money, and it does try.
But even Los Angeles can't seem to get this right.
They've managed to lose money on what is usually a gimme in the Revenue Department for Local governments.
We'll talk about that next.
You're listening to KFI AM six forty on demand.
KFI AM six forty live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. It's halftime in Lexington, Kentucky. The Bruins are down seven, seven seeded UCLA trailing second seeded Tennessee thirty two to twenty five.
Win.
Are going to the Sweet sixteen, six seeded BYU just upset three seeded Wisconsin. That could be big for those of you in the bracket pools this year. And Houston and Gonzaga in the final two minutes. Top seeded Houston is up seven right now. I hope you're enjoying all this madness. There's plenty of madness in Los Angeles. We did some stories recently about how you're not supposed to be parking in bike lanes, and this time they mean it.
If you get caught parking in the excuse me bike lane, the bus lane, your ticket's like two hundred and sixty seven dollars. They are not messing around. They need the cash and that's a big fine, so you got to keep it moving. But there are other ways that you can violate parking laws meters expiring, no parking zonezes, loading zones, handicapped spots that you're not supposed to be in, and
the city collects that money. And none of us likes getting a ticket, but that money can be put to good use when it comes in, and cities depend on it. I know there are smaller communities that don't have the type of revenue a city like Los Angeles should where I mean, they've got patrol people out there watching every little stop sign to make sure you don't do one of those rolling stops that you saw. I mean, they're collecting every single penny. There's money to be made in
parking enforcement and LA seems to know it. But this
city can't even get this right. A new report from Crosstown, LA, a really excellent report, analyzed a bunch of this data and they found that in the fiscal year that ended last year, and again it just quick municipal econ one oh one fiscal years they run from July first to June thirty, so the current fiscal year will end at the end of June, but the one that ended at the end of June last year, the city collected one hundred and ten million dollars in parking fines.
One hundred and ten million dollars. That's a good chunk of change.
But Crosstown LA analyzed the costs of collecting those fines, salaries, equipment used, the processes, and all of that. That added up to eighty eight million dollars. And then, when you work a good government job like parking enforcement, you've also got a pension and you have benefits. And according to this data released by Crosstown LA, the city spent one
hundred and seventy six million dollars. The City of Los Angeles spent one hundred and seventy six million dollars to collect one hundred ten ten million dollars in parking fines. And that's why you heard this week term words like fiscal crisis.
At city hall.
Crosstown LA reports that parking finds used to be a reliable source of revenue, but LA's parking enforcement program has produced a widening hole in the city's finances, racking up three hundred and seventy four million dollars more in total cost, and it has from fines since twenty sixteen, so that's eight years that they've analyzed and found that the city brought in three hundred and seventy four million dollars less
than it cost to collect the fines. That's why the city is failing financially and across down LA suggests that there are various factors for this, that there are vacancies and cuts in staffing that have contributed to a decline in citations. Keep that in mind as we talk about layoffs in the coming year, and those traffic officers who still exist that they've got more work to do. The people who write the parking tickets in La, by the way,
are usually not police officers. They work for the Department of Transportation. It's a different unit. And that's why I would be nervous when I hear thousands of layoffs possible in the city and that were my job, because you have to assume the police are safe, that the fire department is safe. But if you're anybody else, you've got
to be shaking in your boots. And when the city cannot manage its own finances and it makes these cuts, it loses out on the opportunities to bring more money in because having the appropriate number of traffic enforcement officers should bring you the amount of money that you forecast. Yeah, they've got pensions and health benefits and all of that, but you should be able to budget it appropriately and it's not working right now. But that's not the only
area where this is screwing with the city finances. Top of the show, we mentioned these lawsuits. You know a lot of these lawsuits they get settled for one rand two hundred and fifty grand, but they're happening every week,
so they're adding up. They're listed as trip and fall, trip and fall, Trip and fall, that's the category that they're in, and it usually involves somebody being injured by city infrastructure, a sidewalk that was broken, a a street light that may have fallen on somebody's car, and some of them are terrible injuries, and so the city has to pay out and then they don't have the money to invest in the infrastructure in the first place to prevent these things from happening. And it's only going to
get worse. The city is in a lot of trouble. Like I said, we want to hear from you as well, and you've been playing along. Do we have some of those talkbacks in the system ready to go yet?
Roll we do. Let's hear the first one.
Hi, Michael Karen Bass is a total idiot. She has no experience in running anything, let alone a city the size of the Los Angeles. I can't believe you could even sit there and listen to these people. There's such liars. They've ruined everything. We're doomed. I'm moving away.
Good luck to you. I know you'll miss the weather. That's what sucks about it. If you feel like you got to leave it, it is often beautiful. Here we got another one, Raoul.
Careen bass is full of s reading from a scriep script s her.
Full of s.
Somebody got the memo about the new rules at city Hall. You've got to watch your language. And I've got another one I want to play for you.
Hey there, I'm not sure if you actually looked at the city budget here, but there is so much waste it's not even funny. The fact that union employees get paid like ninety seven dollars an hour to stand around and do nothing. You know, a dozen of them while one guy digs a hole. No, man, there's so much waste that's not even funny. They can cut a billion out of the budget and not even flinch about it. But oh, it's got it.
We are so grateful that you're participating in the conversation. If you are listening and want to join as well, open up the iHeartRadio app, click on the talkback button. We will play more messages throughout the next hour. Coming up in the next segment, you know how much how many billions of dollars the city of the county are
spending to address homelessness. Well, it turns out that after a couple of scathing audits, the city of Los Angeles has realized that they have nobody at city Hall keeping track of the money. They said that this will past week. I heard it. I've got the clip. I'm going to play it for you and tell you what their plan is to address that. There's more to come in the next hour here on Michael Monks Reports on KFI AM six point forty.
Keep it here KFI AM six forty on demand