Garcetti To Furlough Thousands Of LA Workers; Santa Monica Faces $225 Million Hole; Malibu Situation About To Be Revealed
Written by 991KBU on April 20, 2020
Los Angeles is taking a body blow.
The City of Los Angeles has a budget larger than half of the nations on the globe … and Malibu lives in an orbit around the city.
Mayor Eric Grcetti was near tears yesterday when he delivered news of the human toll.
GARCETTI GRIEVING
As bad as that is … the financial cost may be worse.
The financial hit on the City of Los Angeles will be enormous.
GARCETTI FISCAL
Garcetti says employees will get the equivalent of a 10% pay cut in the coming fiscal year.
There will be cuts to government programs and the furlough of thousands of city employees.
Cultural centers, the Los Angeles Zoo and scores of branch libraries may not reopen.
City employees have been reassigned to work in recreation centers operating as makeshift homeless shelters.
Furlough days will not be demanded of police officers, firefighters or workers at the Department of Water and Power, among others. Trash pickup will remain intact, a Garcetti aide said.
The city of Malibu is also getting hammered.
The city council well hold special budget meeting on Wednesday … to begin taking a budget knife to Malibu’s budget.
City manager Reva Feldman will have to reveal the exact extent of the bad news for Malibu in the next day or so.
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In Santa Monica …. the city manager just resigned.
Rick Cole was already under heavy fire for his proposed budget cuts.
As of Friday afternoon … more than 28 hundred people had signed a petition
that called for Cole and Chief Operating Officer Katie Lichtig to be fired.
Lichtig was city manager in Malibu two decades ago.
Santa Monica faces a $226 million budget gap as the economic impacts of coronavirus slashes revenues from sales, hotel and parking taxes.
Cole has said he was “prepared to persevere in the face of this daunting battle and lead our organization through this crisis.”
But now he says he has since recognized his limits and is “offering to step aside now to facilitate the restructuring that must take place.”
And Cole says Santa Monica “will need to make reductions in staff at every level of the organization.”
Notably … the city Chief Operating Officer Katie Lichtig was not named acting city manager.
The city attorney will take over that role on Santa Monica.
