L.A. council members tap the brakes on Mayor Karen Bass’ budget

Good morning, and welcome to L.A. on the Record — our City Hall newsletter. It’s David Zahniser, with much help from Julia Wick, giving you the latest on the machinations of L.A. city government.

Not long after taking office, Mayor Karen Bass asked the City Council for a quick $50 million — a sum that was essentially seed money for her fight against homelessness, the No. 1 crisis gripping the city.

Bass, in the wake of a decisive election victory, had already declared a citywide emergency on homelessness. She had also launched Inside Safe, her signature effort to bring some of the city’s neediest residents indoors, which had tackled big encampments in Hollywood and Venice.

The City Council handed over the money with little fuss.

Fast forward four months, and Bass is making a much bigger ask: $250 million for Inside Safe, plus more for other related programs. This time around, council members are asking far more questions — and demanding greater oversight of the city’s fight against homelessness.

That dynamic revealed itself over the last two weeks as members of the council’s Budget, Finance and Innovation Committee pored over Bass’ spending proposal, which seeks about $1.3 billion overall to combat the crisis, raising issues with her team.

Councilmember Bob Blumenfield, along with some of his colleagues, called for a portion of the homelessness funding requested by Bass to be placed into a special account — known to City Hall veterans as the unappropriated balance, or the “UB” — so that the mayor’s spending proposal can be vetted in greater detail over the coming months.

Under that arrangement, the mayor’s team would need to return to the council, possibly multiple times, to secure the remainder of the funding for Inside Safe. Blumenfield said council members, while working in partnership with the mayor, need to know more about how the money will be spent and how those programs will work.

“The first $50 million we gave her for Inside Safe was kind of a no-strings-attached thing,” Blumenfield said. “It was, ‘We’re in a crisis, it’s your first 100 days, you want to start immediately, here’s $50 million. Go.’ But that’s not how government works. That’s not how checks and balances work. … For me and many others, it was never the way things would work moving forward.”

Blumenfield, who heads the budget committee, said he expects the mayor will still receive the money she’s seeking. But he also wants to provide an additional layer of oversight. “This is our top priority as a city,” he told The Times on Thursday. “We need to all be engaged.”

Bass, in an interview, sharply criticized Blumenfield’s budget strategy, calling it a “throwback to the past,” when City Hall acted with a lack of urgency on the homelessness crisis. She said she is already working closely with council members in choosing which encampments are targeted under Inside Safe.

“One of the things that we’ve tried to do in these last 140 days is to turn the page away from … the lack of urgency that was there before,” she said. “We’ve been operating very well with the council with a sense of urgency to get rid of the encampments, to clear out the encampments, to house people. Why on earth would we want to slow that down?”

Bass said she fears that if the money is placed in the unappropriated balance, council members will decide to spend it on other things. Contractors who participate in Inside Safe won’t have certainty that they will receive funding for the full year, she said.

Inside Safe has moved an estimated 1,200 people into hotels and motels since it was launched in December, targeting encampments in downtown, Echo Park, South Los Angeles and several other areas. For the coming year, Bass is seeking about $7 million for homelessness and “housing solutions” staff and supplies, including 13 two-person outreach teams within her office. She plans to spend $23.5 million on a pilot program to provide long-term treatment for unhoused people with substance abuse issues. She wants $47 million to buy eight or more motels.

There are a few obvious reasons why the council, after staying largely in the background for months, is roaring back onto the scene — to the extent that Blumenfield, with his soothing dad jokes, roars.

L.A. spent hundreds of millions of dollars on hotel rooms for the city’s unhoused population before Bass took office. But that effort was heavily backed by the federal government. This year, budget officials say, the money for Inside Safe will come mostly from the general fund, which provides money for police officers, firefighters, park programs and other basic city services.

In other words, a dollar the council commits to Inside Safe is, in many instances, a dollar the city won’t have for other programs.

Bass is also taking the city into relatively uncharted waters. Substance use beds, for example, are typically the responsibility of Los Angeles County, which has agencies devoted to public health and mental health. Some on the budget committee, including Councilmember Monica Rodriguez, have chafed at the idea of spending city money on services that are the county’s responsibility.

“The city is not in that business, nor should it be,” Rodriguez said on Friday. “We should be able to derive the services … that the county is already obligated to provide.”

Bass, for her part, said she is looking to fill a need that the county is not providing. Since federal rules only allow the county to provide substance abuse treatment for 90 days, the city will seek to provide that service on Day 91 in some instances, she said.

“Look, does the city decide to address an emergency or not?” she said. “Does the city say, ‘Well, you know what? We’re just gonna leave you on the street — strung out, robbing, committing crimes —because we’re not in that business.’”

Rodriguez is also in favor of putting a portion of the Inside Safe funds into the unappropriated balance. Councilmember Curren Price, on the other hand, is ready to give Bass the homelessness money up front.

Price, who also sits on the budget committee, said he expects the mayor’s team will update the council regularly, even with the money already in hand.

“The mayor has indicated her willingness to be accountable on a weekly basis, a biweekly basis, a monthly basis for these expenditures,” he said.

The budget committee asked Chief Legislative Analyst Sharon Tso to come up with a strategy for reviewing the mayor’s homelessness funds. That means the next chapter of the Bass budget fight will probably play out next week.

State of play

— TAX TROUBLE: Measure ULA, the so-called mansion tax approved by voters last year, is off to a slow start. The measure collected just $528,000 for the city in April, after a frenzy of sales by property owners who sought to cash in before the tax took effect, The Times reports. Bass is planning to spend $150 million in ULA proceeds in the coming year. Housing officials say they expect property sales to eventually return to normal.

— HARASSMENT CASE SETTLES: An LAPD officer who accused ex-Mayor Eric Garcetti’s former senior advisor, Rick Jacobs, of sexual harassment has tentatively agreed to settle his lawsuit with the city, according to court documents.

— MAKING BIG PLANS: The City Council approved two major planning documents this week — one targeting downtown, the other focused on Hollywood — which seek to bring a combined 135,000 housing units over the next 20 years. One of those plans was rewritten at the eleventh hour in an attempt to protect downtown garment businesses from being pushed out. Downtown business groups voiced alarm over those changes, saying that they will make 12,000 of the housing units planned by the city financially unfeasible.

— FIRING FIREFIGHTERS: The Times took a close look at the Los Angeles Fire Department’s disciplinary practices and found that firefighters kept their jobs after driving drunk, engaging in domestic abuse or even hooking up with a prostitute while on duty.

— ANIMAL SERVICES $$$: The mayor’s budget for the Los Angeles Animal Services department is drawing complaints from advocates who want more money for the troubled department. The spending plan would increase funding for the department by 18% over this year — a substantial boost, but far less than the 56% increase requested by the department.

— MAYOR MOVES: Bass announced a new staff hire this week: Celine Cordero, who will serve as one of her three deputy chiefs of staff. Cordero will oversee the deputy mayors responsible for communications, public safety, community safety, and economic opportunity. She worked at one point in the administration of former Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and has spent the last 10 years at the consulting firm EKA, or Englander Knabe & Allen, which has long been registered to lobby at City Hall.

— AL FRESCO UPDATE: The Planning Commission unanimously approved Bass’ new al fresco ordinance this week, which is supposed to provide “greater flexibility, less red tape, and the slashing of costly fees for restaurants that currently have or are looking to add outdoor dining areas on their private property,” LAist’s Gab Chabrán reports. The matter now heads to the City Council.

— MRT FILES AN APPEAL: After being convicted on bribery and fraud charges, former City Councilmember Mark Ridley-Thomas has asked a federal judge to throw out the jury’s guilty verdicts and grant him a new trial in the high-profile corruption case. Lawyers for the former council member argued this week that prosecutorial misconduct, misstatements of the law, and inaccurate testimony by the lead FBI agent on the case all deprived the longtime politician of a fair trial.

— SCHOOL CALL: Our colleague Howard Blume reports that Bass and L.A. schools Supt. Alberto Carvalho pledged cooperation during a Tuesday morning phone call, after a week of violence and trauma at several L.A. schools. The two leaders identified key safety concerns to address urgently: traffic, violence, drugs.

— VALLEY PASSING: Former Police Commission president and San Fernando Valley automotive macher Bert Boeckmann has died at 92. Boeckmann was a Valley community leader who grew Galpin Motors into an empire. Here’s a Patrick McGreevy profile from 2001 on Boeckmann’s influence at City Hall, where the Republican remained an insider despite his financial support for San Fernando Valley secession and a breakup of the Los Angeles Unified School District.

— MET BALL WEST? Bass was among the extremely star-studded guest list at a Sunday night party at the mansion of former CAA agent turned investor Michael Kives, according to multiple tabloids. Kives was a vocal backer of Rick Caruso during the mayoral campaign, even appearing in a video for him with Nicole Avant. Pop star Katy Perry — another Caruso supporter last year — was also at the party.

TMZ has a photo of the mayor leaving the event with what appears to be a gift bag from Skims, Kim Kardashian‘s shape and loungewear brand. (The gift bag is in the process of being returned, Bass spokesperson Zach Seidl said. Seidl did not respond when asked whether the mayor was returning the bag because of rules governing gifts that city officials can receive, or because Kardashian also endorsed Caruso.)

QUICK HITS

• Where is Inside Safe? The mayor’s homelessness initiative did not venture into any new neighborhoods. However, her team put together a housing fair for residents of the L.A. Grand, a downtown hotel on Figueroa Street that’s being used as temporary homeless housing.
• On the docket for next week: The council’s Budget, Finance and Innovation Committee will resume its deliberations on Friday, taking up such issues as police hiring and Bass’ homelessness initiatives.