About those City Hall layoffs (or lack of)

Back in March, Los Angeles Antonio Villaraigosa announced the city might have to eliminate 767 jobs to help balance the municipal budget -- a shocker since municipal layoffs are so rare. So, a few months later, how many city employees are actually headed to the unemployment line?

Four.

Yes, only four workers, and some of those may end up finding other jobs in L.A. city government, which still employs nearly 50,000 workers, reports the Daily News.

Turns out that nearly all of the workers whose positions were eliminated were moved into vacant city jobs. City leaders say eliminating the positions will help financially. But some taxpayer groups claim the city was never serious about cost-cutting and that Villaraigosa used the threat of layoffs to help justify a fee increase.

"Government officials have perfected the art of crying wolf. We hear all the time that people are going to be laid off, and rarely do layoffs occur," said Jon Coupal of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association. They're simply trying to scare the citizenry into either sympathizing with the government or laying the groundwork for future tax increases."

-- Jesus Sanchez

Photo: Gary Friedman / Los Angeles Times

Comments

[Jeff Cherniss]

RE: lack of City layoffs
Fascinating how the Times has finally recognized that government can be "too big" after fighting for policies that increase the power and intrusion of government into our lives. Interesting how the Times cites the Daily News as its source... if the Times ran a more efficient shop, it would be breaking rather than copying news reports. I'm sorry for the many good journalists who have lost positions as a consequience of the Times' muddying the distinction between news and opinion.
--Jeff Cherniss, Los Gatos CA

[skeptical reader]

The Daily News has also laid off many writers and editorial executives, the latest one in a memo today quoted in L A Observed -- and the editor, Carolina Garcia, who replaced the populist Ron Kaye, signed off to her staff as "Gracias." This reflects the pro-illegal bias in that paper since she took over in April -- article after article of biased Opinion that's supposed to make us cry for gangbanger kids of illegal immigrant, poor and uneducated mothers, caught in the lifestyle of their own making, but with the twist that it's OUR fault for not paying for more programs, the "hug a thug" variety like with the property tax Hahn is pushing now.

Their best writers like Bridget Johnson have also left, while pro-illegal Rachel Uranga writes piece after piece in this vein. Beth Barrett sensationalizes stories like DWP rate increases by printing names as well as salaries/ jobs of ALL employees to stir outrage, then did it again with ALL city employees recently, implying there's too much dead wood. Maybe so, but the paper's focus was public ridicule and embarrassment, not analysis of the most outrageous salaries for doing the least. Many of their readers complain and have cancelled that paper, too.

The Times is on a similar path with pro-illegal bleeding-heart stories by Ana Gorman, which turn off many readers. The bias about immigration from Op Ed writers like Tim Rutten, the endless bashing of anyone not Obama by horrible excuse for a writer Rosa Brooks, and now several cop-bashing stories in a row plus yesterday's Op Ed titled, "the problem isn't the gangs, it's the cops," supports reader views that BOTH papers substitute Opinon for factual articles in a blatant attempt to pander to the Latino vote, like the politicians are.

BUT legal and long-time Hispanic residents also want to get illegal gangbangers off the streets and deport them where possible -- they want safe streets and not to pay for more and more programs for illegals while their kids' schools and hospitals and parks have gone to the dogs. The English-reading Hispanics are the more assimilated ones, the illegals whose opinions shouldn't matter followSpanish media.

So this strategy is backfiring, driving off long time readers and not gaining new ones. We've never seen any stats about the net costs of illegal immigration, and never will; finally, the Times does have a homicide report and has to deal with what % of crime is interracial, and it did run good articles about Glassell Park, and the radical shift of South L A to being mostly Latino within two decades. But only after the public made it clear it didn't believe what the Times, Daily News (like the N Y Times) were telling us.

[Randy]

The LA Times has been the "bag man" for Villaraigosa's filthy administration as well as for the City Council for years.

Give me a break! It's well known by those close to the scene that the reason why "The Fishwrap" (a/k/a the LA Times) has had such poor coverage of Villaraigosa, et al: YOU WERE TOLD THAT IF YOU DIDN'T WRITE FAVORABLE STORIES, YOU WOULDN'T HAVE ACCESS TO THE MAYOR.

So the LA Times went along with it, instead of doing some good research and reporting on stories like this. If the Times did this, it would have known that the layoffs were never going to happen.

The LA Times as we knew it, is now dead.

And the kick in the pants is that the TIMES is going to have MORE LAYOFFS THAN THE CITY!!