Mayor Bass released her budget last month, and the City Council is currently considering it. While the City is in dire financial straits (largely of their own making), this budget does not treat our traffic violence crisis with any sense of urgency.
StreetsLA (the city department that repaves streets) has had its budget cut by 13%, from 229M to 199M.
StreetsLA’s Pavement Preservation Program — which is the primary mechanism for Measure HLA implementation, was cut by 21%. Even worse, despite the department now having to put in ADA compliant curb ramps every time they repave a street (maybe?), no new money was allocated for curb ramps. A budget reduced by 21% will actually repave even fewer streets because the money for curb ramps will have to come from the resurfacing budget. The net effect will be fewer streets repaved, meaning fewer Mobility Plan safety improvements implemented.
LADOT’s budget was cut by 1%, from $217M to $215M. However, this is worse than it seems on the surface, as there are zero new positions for LADOT to be able to keep up with StreetsLA’s (reduced) repaving, meaning the current plan at LADOT is status quo (ie. very slow implementation of the mobility plan). The net effect will be that LADOT will struggle to do even a fraction of what StreetsLA could repave in the next year on mobility plan corridors, further slowing down mobility plan implementation. You can read LADOT’s response to the budget here.
There are other things to be concerned with in this budget; the City’s speed hump program — one of the programs most popular with Angelenos sick of cars speeding down residential streets — has been cut from $1.9M to $750,000. Even the sign and paint maintenance budget — the budget that LADOT uses to put up signs and paint lines on the street — was cut by $2.5M.
A slide from the CAO when he made his unagendized attack on HLA on February 16, 2024 at City Council
Perhaps most egregiously, the CAO claimed that HLA would cost $310M/year over 10 years, and told the City Council that, if passed by voters, “Council would need to make hard decisions immediately about how to pay for it.” While we called out his numbers as a political stunt at the time, this budget makes it very clear how much of a stunt it actually was, as the only money the budget actually allocates specifically to HLA is $102,000 to LADOT to create the measure’s mandated dashboard. That’s a difference of $309,898,000.
The only money in the budget allocated specifically to Measure HLA
While most budget decisions are made behind closed doors at City Hall, we hope that the Mayor and City Council recognize that we live in a city where a pedestrian is injured every five hours and killed every two days, making it the most dangerous city in the country to walk in.
This is a public safety and public health crisis, and even in dire financial straits, there is no more basic duty of a City than to protect its citizens from harm. Unfortunately, this budget does the opposite, and we expect the road safety problem in the City to get worse as a result.