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Budget committee identifies $60M in potential cuts, seeks swaps to avoid layoffs
Summary
The Los Angeles City Council Budget and Finance Committee reviewed a CAO memo listing roughly $60 million of potential reductions and offsets that could be used to restore city positions and services and instructed staff to model tradeoffs between public safety, homelessness spending and other core functions.
The Los Angeles City Council Budget and Finance Committee spent a large portion of its May 8 session reviewing a City Administrative Office (CAO) catalog of potential reductions and offsets totaling roughly $60 million in the current fiscal year and about $100 million on an ongoing basis.
Committee chair and CAO staff presented “Memo 82,” a portfolio-style list of proposed decreases and deferrals across departments — including new program cuts in Fire, scaled-back police sworn hiring, reductions in new zoo transition items, and various across-the-board trims to discretionary accounts — intended to create room in the budget to restore positions threatened with layoff.
Why it matters: the CAO told the committee the package could yield significant structural savings and allow the council to restore hundreds of positions otherwise slated for elimination. Committee members repeatedly said the question is not whether savings exist but which savings to accept and how to spend them to reflect council values: public safety, homelessness services, street repairs and other day-to-day operations.
Key proposals identified in Memo 82 included: reducing newly proposed fire program add-ons, cutting or slowing sworn police hiring from 480 to 240 hires for the year, reducing various newly funded zoo transition items, and trimming discretionary General City Purposes accounts by 10 percent. The CAO said its recommendations are modular: members can pick individual line items rather than adopt the whole package.
Committee feedback: members asked the CAO and Chief Legislative Analyst (CLA) to model specific tradeoffs — for example, how fire cuts could be used to restore specialized LAPD civilian positions, or how savings might be applied to homelessness interim housing. Several members asked to hold some options until later in the day to hear departments’ operational consequences.
Next steps: the committee directed the CAO and CLA to incorporate the policy-level direction heard on the record and return with allocations that match the committee’s priorities. Several council members proposed keeping some savings in a temporary “bucket” to allow the city more time to evaluate structural realignments and minimize layoffs.
Meeting provenance: the committee introduced Memo 82 at the start of the discussion and spent much of the morning on its contents before breaking into departmental follow‑ups. The transcript segments that open and close the Memo 82 discussion were recorded in the committee’s proceedings.
