LAist

The red envelope gets fatter.

But guess where they found $2.4 million of the emergency cash they needed to save their City Hall family?

Your overflowing parking-ticket fund, of course!

Bill ya later.

Nope: They look to their broke-ass constituents, already drowning in a dismal economy (even worse as of today, we hear), if not completely jobless.

In a report prepared by Chief Legislative Analyst Gerry Miller and being mulled by City Councilmembers, in which Miller proposes 15-odd ways the city could fix its budget crisis without voter consent, a few hidden taxes stand out as particularly insulting:

He'd have been a shoddy salesman.

But billions of dollars central to keeping that promise are still up in the air.

Kyle T. Webster

oops

The big issue is more than $40 million that Villaraigosa had wanted to borrow on commercial paper. That debt plan has now been trashed, and the burden has been placed on the L.A. Police Department to come up with $40 million in cuts.

But with no plan and no deadline, this could be a bit too easy to procrastinate on:

Council Prez. Eric Garcetti: game face.

The piece begins with an eerie quote from City Council President Eric Garcetti, describing the $6.9 billion consensus: "After 10 years on the council, this was the smoothest one we have had."

Uh oh. When Garcetti says something's going smoothly, it's time to sound the alarm. (See: Hollywood Farmers Market "negotations" with the L.A. Film School.)

Wikipedia

Excuse the councilman's Dr. Evilness; he's got your money in mind.

Public anger over the city's inflated pensions and too-perfect health-care packages has finally made it into mainstream budget talks -- and for that, they take a hit in both Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's 2011-12 budget proposal and the budget committee's followup. But, exasperatingly, hundreds of additional benefits still fly under the radar.

Kyle T. Webster

Today the Los Angeles City Council will begin discussing changes to the mayor's proposed budget - but they employ the same bag of tricks. On the books, the 15 City Council members list 108 people employed on their personal staffs for the last decade. The the L.A. City Council consistently employs more than double that under "As-Needed" hires:

Kyle T. Webster

"Basically they are gutting and shutting down the neighborhood council system," Handal says.

L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's plan to borrow $50 million on commercial paper was heavily criticized -- and now, at the last minute -- thrown out. His 2011-12 City budget proposal that will go before the City Council tomorrow will now need to account for this gaping $50 million hole:

Fire Chief Millage Peaks actually has a backbone

It's budget talk time and McOsker is calling Fire Chief Millage Peaks's re-orginization plan for L.A. Fire Department a disaster. L.A. would save $200 million in three years.

Peaks is behaving very out of character for someone of power in L.A.: rationally defending his plan against the powers that be - and taking full responsibility for his ideas:

Fire union: Budget cuts equal death

But no one is unhappier than the L.A. city firefighters union, who would be deprived of 300 paying members if the City Council approves the plan. KPCC reports that "The department also would close 18 engines, seven hook-and-ladder trucks and four ambulances. All this would save the city $190 million over three years."

Surprisingly, Fire Captain Jaime Moore backs (and actually helped design) the plan...

Do you smell something?

LA Daily News agrees with Kaye and suggests we get our heads out of the gutter. There is an 800 pound gorilla in the room: $150 million worth of secretive bonuses paid to City workers.

Firing the budget proposal debate: fire safety cuts

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Things will get heated. Last year, police had to clear the Council Chambers amidst union protests. With a lame duck mayor, whose gloves will come off this year?

LAPD-City Hall relations are about to get a lot hairier

It's not the finalized budget for 2011-2012 -- many grueling meetings separate us from that glorious summer day -- but we have before us the mayor's ideal vision of it, at least. And if L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa wants his cash (er, our cash) lined up a certain way, his City Councilmembers seldom fail to deliver via nice, happy unanimous vote to keep the city family at peace.

But we digress! The first draft of the city budget is here...

Why so glum? It's payday!

Ha! But of course not. Not even thrifty people's hero Brown can escape the pull of the California prison guards union, one of the largest donors to his 2010 campaign and hands-down the most powerful electoral manipulator in the state. (More than the teachers' union. And that's no small feat.)

Either the dude's senile...

Governor Jerry Brown needs some Arnold applause

It's all bad news today, with the Public Policy Institute of California poll showing a nasty drop from 53 percent to 46 percent among likely voters who back the governor's proposal to extend tax hikes for five years. Compare Jerry Brown's dilemma with where Arnold Schwarzenegger stood during his third month in Sacramento, getting interrupted with 36 rounds of applause by the legislature as he called to cut $14 billion:

Updated after the jump: SoCal Connected Executive Producer weighs in on early feedback, possible government reactions.

Yummy, taxpayer dollars are so tender and juicy.

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That's just the teaser -- tomorrow SoCal Connected will be reporting what they uncovered after six months of document scouring:

Adrienne Hatrick, retired city employee, believes in 'the people that brought you the weekend.'

The message? It was for Senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein: "Stand strong against attacks on the 'American Dream' and workers' rights by republicans."

About 70 people -- a sparse turnout for a group such as MoveOn -- and many passerby honking car horns, protested: "More than $100 billion in cuts to the federal budget, which would include 75,000 jobs lost in California." Decisions will be made Friday -- tax extensions could ease the cuts, if put on the ballot for June.

Among the crowd stood students, teachers and ex-city employees (and Steven Box, who recently lost in the race for City Council District 4 ):

Is this California's definition of "blight" if the neighbors are too sick or too fat?

Few overweight or sickly Californians ever knew that the Los Angeles City Council and Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency tried to gin up a state law defining "blight," by bizarrely expanding "blight" to include streets with lots of sick or fat residents.

Assembly Bill 2531 was an Orwellian fright law. It was ghostwritten by the L.A. Community Redevelopment Agency and pushed by Felipe Fuentes, the "worst legislator in California." This week, the slime got thicker: State Controller John Chiang's audit says the Los Angeles redevelopment agency wrongly slipped $883,000 out of an affordable housing fund in 2010, blowing it on "administrative fees." And Chiang warns he barely looked under the hood:

Ron Kaye snags the secret CRA documents.

It's all at ronkayela.com, where former Los Angeles Daily News editor Kaye got hold of 200 pages of documents. As city-paid attorney Glenn Wasserman chortles in one doc, a high-end gang inside the Villaraigosa Administration met to devise "a poison pill hail Mary to try to keep as much CRA funds in LA" as possible, and screw Brown as the governor tries to keep California above water. The City Hall gang's names are here:

An employee mans Los Angeles City Hall's state-of-the-art collections system.

He got a $125 fine for a malfunctioning burglar alarm that went off in 2008. He decided to challenge it. His odyssey reveals the inability of wildly inefficient staffers at the L.A. Department of Finance (Van Nuys and downtown), the "Alarm Section," and the Police Commission to grasp that Hanock changed his mind and paid the $215 in 2010. Baffled city staffers sicced a collection agency on Hanock and twisted themselves in knots of pointless paperwork. You're paying for this.

Ever see that brilliant, dark movie "Brazil"?