Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa

LOS ANGELES  _ Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said Tuesday that Los Angeles will lay off more than 700 workers in the coming months and eliminate thousands of jobs as the nation’s second-largest city struggles to close a $500 million budget gap.

In addition to reducing the public work force, the Democratic mayor warned the recession-battered city to prepare for cuts in road repairs, tree trimming and library hours.

“This is not a budget that reflects why I ran for office,” the mayor said in his annual address to the City Council.

The speech began what is shaping up as a tense budget season at City Hall. The mayor’s spending plan for the fiscal year that begins July 1 must be approved by the council, which has chafed at some of his proposals.

“We’ll have to make some difficult choices and it won’t be easy,” City Council President Eric Garcetti said in a statement.

Working with the council, the mayor wants to slash roughly 3,500 positions through job cuts, early retirements and the elimination of vacant posts.

The mayor’s office said there would be about 800 layoffs overall _ 100 already have taken place. The cuts would be the deepest in the city work force since the 1970s.

Villaraigosa once promised to remake Los Angeles for the 21st century, but the second-term mayor now talks of limited resources and cuts that will be “severe … painful.”

The labor cuts would trim the work force paid from the city’s general fund by about 14 percent, although many of those positions are now vacant. Overall, Los Angeles has 46,000 workers, but 21,000 are paid from separate sources such as at the Department of Water and Power, which collects utility payments.

As he has in the past, Villaraigosa suggested layoffs could be reduced, or avoided if employees took wage cuts or contributed more toward costly benefits. Union leaders have been cool to those ideas.

“We can avoid many of these cuts and we can find better ways of protecting our fiscal health,” the mayor said. “We must all be willing to take cuts in our pay, increase our pension contribution and contribute more to our health care plans.”

Governments across the nation are hurting after a national recession, but California has been especially hard hit. The unemployment rate in the state is 12.6 percent, a modern record for California. The Los Angeles economy has lost 65,000 jobs, the mayor said.

Los Angeles is also paying for its decision to hire workers during economic boom times while failing to recognize those days could end. The mayor said soaring pension costs now eat up $2 of every $10 the city spends from its general fund.

The recession “is tearing a gaping hole in our city budget and forcing us to take measures unimaginable a few short years ago,” the mayor said.

Despite the grim outlook, the mayor said he would protect jobs at the Police Department, where the staff of about 10,000 is the largest in city history, while working to lure green jobs and investment from Washington, D.C. for transportation projects.

“There are sunnier days ahead,” the mayor said.

The presumed swarm of prisoners did not come to a neighborhood near you, though, because the total number of releases was either very small, or perhaps even none.

Confused?

That’s what happens when hearsay and rumors take over in what appears to be a campaign to thwart any changes to the state’s prison system.

Beginning last year, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger attempted to save the state from bankruptcy through a dual revitalization of California’s public safety laws and the state’s penitentiary system. He submitted a plan to provide early releases for approximately 6,500 prisoners over the course of 2010. The move intended to cut the state’s jailing costs and also avoid unneeded costs for the courtroom appeals. A federal judge approved the plan, although after much debate the state legislature and the governor are still fighting over it in court.

Moreover, due to dangerous levels of over-crowding at state prisons, many public officials and lawmakers have been prompted to question the role of “parole” in the California penal system. Under the governor’s plan and the new law SB 18XXX, which came into effect January 25^th, low-level parolees would be released little by little over this year. These 6,500 low-level parolees would be subject to random search and drug testing on the streets of Los Angeles by any police officer, even without a warrant.

The plan touched off a wave of paranoia among the general public, many blogs, and some other media. Misinformation spread, and many came to believe 6,500 inmates were to be released at once on January 25. The rumors grew with incorrect reports that these newly released prisoners would be unsupervised and set completely free of all legal responsibility participant in rehabilitation programs or other parole programs.

Paul M. Weber, the president of the Los Angeles Police Protective League, a union for law-enforcement officers, made a public announcement, giving the sense that the new law would be grave and disastrous for the entire Los Angeles community. He called the movement to release the prisoners “…just another example where the government has failed to do one of its primary functions, which is public safety.”

Weber’s perspective has induced many others to follow his outlook. Statements from Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s Office of Gang Reduction and Youth Development have also taken a grave tone. Little wonder that it all caught the general public flat-footed.

“What the hell,” was about all that Sarah Guidas, an undergraduate at USC, could say amid the misinformation.

Truth be told, the new law is meant to improve prison conditions and save state money for welfare, education, or public transportation. Through lessening the number of low-level prisoners, the inhumane and over-crowding prisons will become more controllable for officers and less packed with relatively small-time offenders. Parolees who were released under the old system were often returned to jail due to minor violations of technical offence, such as returning to a neighborhood that is deemed outside their parole jurisdiction. Under the new law a parolee would be allowed to return to, or travel to, any neighborhood. That means the new law would allow a parolee to return to his or her home, where he or she may have a family. Under the old system a return home might have taken a parolee to a forbidden neighborhood, leading to a parole violation sent the individual back through the court system and onto an already-overcrowded prison cell.

The misinformation about the early release of these 6,500 relatively low-level parolees has in reality created a public paranoia that is unnecessary and hurtful towards change in the state’s system.  By slowly reducing the number of parolees and low-level risk prisoners, penitentiaries will become less crowded and unneeded state spending will be saved. However, many will not see these new changes in this light. Due to heightened public anxiety and worrisome public officials, the grassroots’ truth behind these changes may not be seen.