Mayor Villaraigosa on the "State of the City"
Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa gave his "state of the city" speech this week, and made some promises that the city's budget problems might make hard to keep.
Villaraigosa gave his talk at the Balqon Electric Truck factory in Harbor City, symbolizing the sort of new, exciting tech jobs he hopes his city can be home to more of.
He acknowledged the city's fiscal troubles, noting that he hopes to avoid layoffs of city employees via pay cuts (an hour worked without pay a week), furloughs, and getting city employees to pay 2 percent more toward their health insurance. And he promised further and deeper city support for small businesses, both in terms of loans and help through complicated permitting processes.
One of his proposals is to create a "clean tech corridor" near downtown to attract and create new businesses in such fields as "green building," renewable energy, and water conservation. He also talked up youth training and job programs, $30 million worth of rental assistance to 4,000 low-income families, and 1,000 more police on the streets.
The Daily News in an editorial on the speech thinks it might all be too little, too late:
Where are the structural changes? Where is the retooling of the city's pension system, which is probably going to be L.A.'s next disaster? If the mayor can turn around the city's finances with tiny employee givebacks, why did he wait so long? To be sure, there will be more details of the sacrifices asked of us all when Villaraigosa unveils his budget next week. Maybe another trash fee hike?
A couple of specific details of the speech are being questioned/attacked by local commenters. At WitnessLA, Celeste Fremon worries that Villaraigosa's announced plan for new centralized "Family Source Centers" to help people, in the mayor's words, "seek assistance for themselves and their families, file for critical tax credits, access affordable medical care, and benefit from programs at every level of government" will muck up already existing programs dependent on Community Development Block Grants, programs with deep and ongoing relationships with the communities they serve.
And the "clean tech corridor" might not work at the mayor hopes, says Eric Richardson at Blogdowntown. He worries that the specific area Villaraigosa has in mind between downtown's core and the L.A. River is:
a maze of tiny parcels and tiny blocks. Assembling large chunks of land is lengthy at best, and often simply infeasible. Infrastructure such as power and communications is also outdated and would need to be updates for more current users. One would be hard-pressed to find evidence that a cash-strapped city can offer the incentives necessary to get new industry interested in such complicated land.
But the largest and most cogent overriding problem with Villaraigosa's planning anything that's going to cost the city any money comes from Patrick Range McDonald at the L.A. Weekly. At the end of the speech, McDonald wrote, "Everyone was smiling, but the city still faces a nearly $1 billion budget shortfall."
The full text of Villaraigosa's State of the City Address.
(Photo by Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images)
