Wendy Greuel for City Controller

Greuel reviews city budget measures

BY KAREN PACKER, Sherman Oaks Sun 5/30/08

As she works to wrap up her agenda before the end of her last term in office, City Councilmember Wendy Greuel gave an update on the city budget, gang intervention, and the ongoing land use issues facing Los Angeles and surrounding areas at the May 21 meeting of the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Association (SOHA).

Greuel called the 52 hours of hearings the city council recently completed to balance and adopt the new city budget “one of the most difficult [projects] that I had ever seen.

“Our city is facing an enormous structural deficit. I took the opportunity for us to look at long-term fiscal healthiness...to make sure we did structural changes that insured we would never have this kind of big deficit again.”

To that end, Greuel said some budget cuts and one-time fixes were necessary, and that certain long-term solutions were reached.

The city was able to maintain funding for an additional 780 police officers, allowing it to stay on track toward meeting its goal of 10,000 sworn officers in the next year. Money was also allocated for the synchronization of 348 traffic lights and the installation of 147 left-hand turn signals.

The city council also adopted a few of Greuel’s proposals that would help generate additional revenue without raising taxes: allocating 100 percent of the money earned from the sale of surplus city property to the city’s general fund, eliminating parking validation in the city, and expanding advertising on city buses and trains.

To further help balance the budget, Greuel gave $100,000 out of her own city budget to the general fund, standing behind her belief that “each of us as council members need to take some personal responsibility.”

Another area of concentration for Greuel has been public safety, including gang intervention and prevention, a critical issue that she said costs the city $2 billion per year.

“We are facing a gang crisis in the city of Los Angeles. [We have] over 80,000 gang members,” Greuel said. “We lose more of our children to a life of crime each passing day. Our old strategies are clearly not working. We need to fundamentally change the way we attack the problem.”

The new budget reserves funds for an audit of the city’s gang intervention and prevention programs and expands program funding by $24 million.

Greuel also touched on the Ventura Boulevard Specific Plan, agreeing with the coalition of communities along the Boulevard that the plan should not be opened at this time. She said she is examining the impact of future updates to the Specific Plan and also working on resolving issues surrounding the plan that could bring revenue to adjacent areas.

Greuel’s six-year service as representative of the 2nd council district will end in the spring of 2009 when she plans to begin her campaign for Los Angeles City Controller, a post currently held by Laura Chick.

She thanked SOHA members for their involvement in the community, calling them the “eyes and ears” of elected officials.