Five months ago, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass revealed that more than 1,600 city workers might have to be laid off to close a $1-billion budget shortfall.
On Tuesday, after months of negotiations, Bass stood at City Hall with union leaders and announced that her administration had averted every layoff.
“Some people said it couldn’t be done, but I am so glad to stand here today and say that we have proved the naysayers wrong,” Bass said.
The announcement came on the heels of an agreement with the L.A. City Coalition of Unions, which collectively represents gardeners, mechanics and clerks, who will take up to five unpaid holidays in 2026. Seventy-five workers had previously been targeted for layoffs.
Since the mayor unveiled her proposed budget in late April, she and the City Council have worked to reduce layoffs through a variety of cost-cutting measures. The council scaled back hiring at the LAPD and reduced the number of new hires in the fire department, saving about 1,000 jobs.
Last month, the Los Angeles Police Protective League, which represents sworn LAPD officers, and the Engineers and Architects Assn., which represents city planners and some LAPD civilian employees, signed agreements with the city that saved nearly 300 other jobs.
The Police Protective League agreed to a voluntary program where officers can take days off in exchange for overtime hours, while Engineers and Architects Assn. members will take up to five unpaid holidays.
While the unions negotiated, the city began laying off workers, with many members of the Engineers and Architects Assn. sent home, said Marleen Fonseca, the union’s executive director.
On Monday, Fonseca spoke with a member who had been hospitalized over the weekend, delivering the good news that he had his job back.
“Had we not had this agreement, he would be facing a medical crisis with no health insurance,” she said. “This is the real human difference that solidarity makes.”
The city also moved some employees targeted for layoffs into open jobs in other departments. The City Council worked over the course of 10 committee meetings to find those openings, said Councilmember Tim McOsker.
“This is great news for this fiscal year, but we must remain clear-eyed: our city’s budget challenges will continue and we need to stay focused on long-term solutions and protecting our city workforce and services,” McOsker said.
A group of business leaders submitted paperwork on Wednesday for a ballot measure that would repeal Los Angeles’ gross receipts tax, delivering some financial relief to local employers but also punching an $800-million hole in the city budget.
The proposed measure, called the “Los Angeles Cost of Living Relief Initiative,” would strip away a tax imposed on a vast array of businesses: entertainment companies, child care providers, law firms, accountants, healthcare businesses, nightclubs, delivery companies and many others, according to the group that submitted it.
Backers said that repealing a tax long reviled by the business community would help address the city’s economic woes, creating jobs, allowing businesses to stay in the city and making the economy “more affordable for all Angelenos.”
“This initiative is the result of the business community uniting to fight the anti-job climate at City Hall,” said Nella McOsker, president and CEO of the Central City Assn., a downtown-based business group.
McOsker, one of five business leaders who signed the ballot proposal, said city officials have “ignored the pleas of small- and medium-sized businesses for years.” As a result, scores of restaurants and other establishments, including the Mayan Theater, are closing, she said.
The filing of the ballot proposal immediately set off alarms at City Hall, where officials recently signed off on a plan to lay off hundreds of city workers in an attempt to balance this year’s budget. The city’s business tax generates more than $800 million annually for the general fund — the part of the budget that pays for police patrols, firefighters, paramedic response and other core services.
“Public safety is almost exclusively paid for by the general fund,” said City Administrative Officer Matt Szabo, in an email to The Times. “This measure is an assault on public safety. Proponents of this measure will be directly responsible for cutting police or fire staffing in half if it passes.”
McOsker, asked about L.A.’s financial woes, said the city had a $1-billion shortfall this year and still succeeded in balancing the budget. She is the daughter of City Councilmember Tim McOsker, who sits on the five-member budget committee.
The proposed measure is backed by executives and board members with various groups, including the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce, the Greater San Fernando Valley Chamber of Commerce and VICA, the Valley Industry and Commerce Assn.
VICA president Stuart Waldman said the city’s economy has faltered amid a spate of increased taxes, higher city fees and new regulations. The most recent, he said, is the ordinance hiking the minimum wage for hotel employees and workers at Los Angeles International Airport to $30 per hour by 2028, which was approved by the City Council over objections from business leaders.
“We’re usually playing defense,” said Waldman, who also signed the ballot proposal. “We’ve decided the time has come to play offense.”
The business tax proposal is part of a larger ballot battle being waged this year between businesses and organized labor.
Last month, a group of airlines and hotel industry organizations turned in about 140,000 signatures for a proposed ballot measure aimed at overturning the newly approved hotel and LAX minimum wage. L.A. County election officials are currently verifying those signatures.
Unite Here Local 11, which represents hotel employees, responded with its own package of countermeasures. One would require a citywide election on the construction or expansion of hotels, sports stadiums, concert halls and other venues. Another would hike the minimum wage for all workers in the city, raising it to the level of hotel and airport employees.
Two other measures from Unite Here take aim at companies that pay their CEOs more than a hundred times their median employee in L.A., either by forcing them to pay higher business taxes or by placing limitations on their use of city property.
The ongoing ballot battle is “escalating in ways that are reckless and disconnected from the real work of running a city,” said Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky, who heads the council’s budget committee. Yaroslavsky, in a statement, said the fight is “unproductive and needs to stop.”
“We just closed a billion-dollar budget gap, and basic services are already severely strained,” she said. “You don’t fix that by removing one of our largest revenue sources with no plan to replace it. We have to fix what is broken and that requires working together to offer real solutions.”
Josué Marcus, spokesperson for the Los Angeles City Clerk, said proponents of the latest ballot measure would need to gather about 140,000 valid signatures for it to qualify. The next city election is in June 2026. McOsker, for her part, said she believes that state law sets a lower threshold — only 44,000 — for measures that result in the elimination of taxes.
Industry leaders have long decried L.A.’s business tax, which is levied not on profits but on the gross receipts that are brought in — even where an enterprise suffers financial losses.
Former Mayor Eric Garcetti argued for eliminating the tax more than a decade ago, saying it puts the city’s economy at a competitive disadvantage. Once in office, he only managed to scale it back, amid concerns that an outright repeal would trigger cuts to city services.
Organizers of the latest proposal said it would not rescind business taxes on the sale of cannabis or medical marijuana, which were separately approved by voters.
Musician Dennis Henriquez woke up in a doorway in East Hollywood last month, hidden behind cardboard and sheltered by a tarp.
When he peered outside, half a dozen sanitation workers were standing nearby, waiting to carry out one of the more than 30 homeless encampment cleanups planned that day by the city of Los Angeles.
Henriquez eventually emerged, carried out a bicycle and deposited it on a grassy area 20 feet away. He also dragged over a backpack, a scooter, two guitars, a piece of luggage and a beach chair.
The city sanitation crew grabbed the tarp and the cardboard, tossing them into a trash truck. Then, the contingent of city workers, including two police officers, climbed into their vehicles and drove away, leaving behind Henriquez and his pile of belongings.
This type of operation, known as a CARE-plus cleanup, plays out hundreds of times each week in the city, with sanitation crews seizing and destroying tents, tarps, pallets, shopping carts and many other objects.
The cleanups have emerged as a huge source of conflict in a five-year-old legal dispute over the city’s handling of the homelessness crisis. Depending on how the cleanup issue is resolved, the city could face legal sanctions, millions of dollars in penalties or increased outside oversight of its homeless programs.
A construction loader plows through the remains of a homeless encampment on Wilshire Boulevard, just west of downtown.
(Etienne Laurent / For The Times)
Sanitation crews grab a mattress during the cleanup. (Etienne Laurent / For The Times)
A notice about the cleanup is displayed on a utility pole on Wilshire Boulevard. (Etienne Laurent / For The Times)
In 2022, city leaders reached a legal settlement with the nonprofit L.A. Alliance for Human Rights, promising to create 12,915 homeless beds or other housing opportunities by June 2027. Eventually, they also agreed to remove 9,800 homeless encampments by June 2026 — with an encampment defined as an individual tent, makeshift structure, car or recreational vehicle.
To reach the latter goal, city leaders have been counting each encampment removed from streets, sidewalks and alleys during the Bureau of Sanitation’s CARE-plus cleanups — even in cases where the resident did not obtain housing or a shelter bed.
The alliance has strongly objected to the city’s methodology, arguing that destroying a tent, without housing its occupants, runs afoul of the 2022 settlement agreement. Any “encampment resolution” tallied by the city must be more permanent — and address the larger goal of reducing homelessness, said Elizabeth Mitchell, an attorney for the alliance.
“If the person insists on staying where they are and nothing else has happened, that’s not a resolution,” she said. “They can’t count that.”
City leaders have carried out CARE-plus cleanups for years, saying they are needed to protect public safety and restore sidewalk access for wheelchair users, the elderly and others. Some encampments are strewn with debris that spills across an entire walkway or out into the street, while others carry the smell of urine, fecal matter or decaying food waste.
The cleanups have a Sisyphean quality. Many seasoned residents drag their tents across the street, wait out the cleanup, then return to their original spots in the afternoon. The process frequently restarts a week or two later.
The alliance’s legal team, alarmed by the inclusion of CARE-plus cleanups in the encampment reduction count, recently spent several days trying to persuade a federal judge to seize control of the city’s homelessness initiatives from Mayor Karen Bass and the City Council and turn them over to a third-party receiver.
U.S. Dist. Judge David O. Carter, who presides over the case, declined to take that step, saying it went too far. But he has made clear that he, too, objects to the city’s approach to eliminating the 9,800 encampments.
In March, Carter issued a court order saying the city may not count CARE-plus cleanups toward its goal because, as the alliance had argued, they are “not permanent in nature.”
Last month, in a 62-page ruling, he found the city had “willfully disobeyed” that order — and had improperly reported its encampment reductions. Clarifying his position somewhat, the judge also said that the city cannot count an encampment reduction unless it is “accompanied by an offer of shelter or housing.”
“Individuals need not accept the offer, but an offer of available shelter or housing must be made,” he wrote.
Attorney Shayla Myers, who represents homeless advocacy groups that have intervened in the case, has opposed the 9,800 goal from the beginning, saying it creates a quota system that increases the likelihood that city workers will violate the property rights of unhoused residents.
“Throwing away tents doesn’t help the homelessness crisis,” she said. “Building housing does.”
Shayna, a person experiencing homelessness, moves things out of a tent during the June 24 encampment cleanup.
(Etienne Laurent / For The Times)
City Administrative Officer Matt Szabo, who helped negotiate the settlement, told the court last month that his office does not count the tents that homeless people move temporarily — around the corner or across the street — during city cleanups. However, the city does include those that are permanently removed because they block the sidewalk or pose a public health or safety threat, he said.
Szabo, during his testimony, said that when he negotiated the promise to remove 9,800 encampments, he did not expect that every tent removal would lead to someone moving inside.
The city is already working to fulfill the alliance agreement’s requirement of creating 12,915 homeless beds or other housing opportunities. On top of that, Szabo said, encampment residents have “free will” to refuse an offer of housing.
“I wouldn’t ever agree that the city would be obligated to somehow force people to accept [housing] if they did not want to accept it,” he said. “We never would have agreed to that. We didn’t agree to that.”
For an outside observer, it might be difficult to discern what the different types of city encampment operations are designed to accomplish.
Mary, a person experiencing homelessness, speaks with a police officer during the June 24 cleanup.
(Etienne Laurent / For The Times)
Bass’ Inside Safe initiative moves homeless people into hotel and motel rooms, and at least in some cases, permanent housing. By contrast, CARE cleanups — shorthand for Cleanup and Rapid Engagement — are largely focused on trash removal, with crews hauling away debris from curbs and surrounding areas.
CARE-plus cleanups are more comprehensive. Every tent must be moved so workers can haul away debris and, in some instances, powerwash sidewalks.
Sanitation crews are supposed to give residents advance warning of a scheduled CARE-plus cleanup, posting notices on utility poles. If residents don’t relocate their tents and other belongings, they run the risk of having them taken away.
In some cases, cleanup crews take the possessions to a downtown storage facility. In many others, they are tossed.
A construction loader transports the remnants of the Westlake encampment to a city garbage truck.
(Etienne Laurent / For The Times)
One of the largest CARE-plus cleanups in recent weeks took place in the Westlake district, where nearly three dozen tents and structures lined a stretch of Wilshire Boulevard. A construction loader drove back and forth on the sidewalk, scooping up tents and depositing them in a trash truck.
Ryan Cranford, 42, said he didn’t know the cleanup was scheduled until minutes beforehand. He wound up losing his tent, a bed and a canopy, but managed to keep his backpack, saying it contained “all that matters.”
Sitting on a nearby retaining wall, Cranford said he would have accepted a motel room had someone offered one.
“Hell, I’d even take a bus to get all the way back to Oklahoma if I could,” he said.
On the opposite side of the street, Tyson Lewis Angeles wheeled his belongings down the street in a shopping cart before sanitation workers descended on his spot. He said an outreach worker had given him a referral for a shelter bed the day before.
Tyson Lewis Angeles, a person experiencing homelessness, holds his dog, Nami, before city sanitation workers descended on his spot on Wilshire Boulevard.
(Etienne Laurent / For The Times)
Angeles, 30, said he was not interested, in part because he deals with panic attacks, PTSD and other mental health issues. He also does not want a roommate, or the rules imposed by homeless shelters.
“Basically, it’s like volunteer jail,” he said.
While Angeles managed to safeguard his possessions, others are frequently less successful.
Nicholas Johnson, who is living in a box truck in Silver Lake, said city crews took the vast majority of his belongings during a CARE-plus cleanup in mid-June. Some were destroyed, while others were transported by sanitation workers to a downtown storage facility, he said.
Johnson, 56, said he does not know whether some of his most prized possessions, including letters written by his grandmother, went into that facility or were tossed. City crews also took books, tools, his Buddhist prayer bowls and a huge amount of clothes.
“All of my clothing — all of my clothing — the wearables and the sellables, all mixed in. Hats, scarves, socks, ties, a lot of accessories that I wear — you know, double breasted suits from the ’30s, the suit pants,” he said.
Nicholas Johnson, who lives with his dog, Popcorn, in a truck parked in Silver Lake, said the city took many of his prized possessions during a recent encampment cleanup.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Johnson said the city’s cleanup process is a “harassment ceremony” that only makes life more stressful for people on the street.
“They hit you in the kneecaps when they know you’re already down,” he said.
Earlier this year, city officials informed the court that they had removed about 6,100 tents, makeshift shelters and vehicles — nearly two-thirds of what the agreement with the alliance requires. Whether the city will challenge any portion of the judge’s ruling is still unclear.
In a statement, a lawyer for the city contends that the ruling “misconstrues the city’s obligations.”
“We are keeping open our options for next steps,” said the lawyer, Theane Evangelis.
The Los Angeles City Council signed off on a $14-billion spending plan for 2025-26 on Thursday, scaling back Mayor Karen Bass’ public safety initiatives as they attempted to spare 1,000 city workers from layoffs.
Faced with a nearly $1-billion budget shortfall, the council voted 12 to 3 for a plan that would cut funding for recruitment at the Los Angeles Police Department, leaving the agency with fewer officers than at any point since 1995.
The council provided enough money for the LAPD to hire 240 new officers over the coming year, down from the 480 proposed by Bass last month. That reduction would leave the LAPD with about 8,400 officers in June 2026, down from about 8,700 this year and 10,000 in 2020.
The council also scaled back the number of new hires the mayor proposed for the Los Angeles Fire Department in the wake of the wildfire that ravaged huge stretches of Pacific Palisades.
Bass’ budget called for the hiring of 227 additional fire department employees. The council provided funding for the department to expand by an estimated 58 employees.
Three council members — John Lee, Traci Park and Monica Rodriguez — voted against the budget, in large part due to cost-cutting efforts at the two public safety agencies. Park, whose district includes Pacific Palisades, voiced alarm over those and other reductions.
“I just can’t in good conscience vote for a budget that makes our city less safe, less physically sound and even less responsive to our constituents,” she said.
Rodriguez offered a similar message, saying the council should have shifted more money out of Inside Safe, Bass’ signature program to address homelessness. That program, which received a 10% cut, lacks oversight and has been extraordinarily expensive, said Rodriguez, who represents the northeast San Fernando Valley.
“Inside Safe currently spends upwards of $7,000 a month to house a single individual. That’s just room and board and services,” she said. “That doesn’t include all of the other ancillary services that are tapped from our city family in order to make it work, including LAPD overtime, including sanitation services, including the Department of Transportation.”
Councilmember Tim McOsker, who sits on the budget committee, said the fire department would still see an overall increase in funding under the council’s budget. Putting more money into the police and fire departments would mean laying off workers who fix streets, curbs and sidewalks, said McOsker, who represents neighborhoods stretching from Watts south to L.A.’s harbor.
McOsker said it’s still possible that the city could increase funding for LAPD recruitment if the city’s economic picture improves or other savings are identified in the budget. The council authorized the LAPD to ramp up hiring if more money can be found later in the year.
“I would love to put ourselves in a position where we could hire more than 240 officers, and maybe we will. I don’t know. But today we can’t,” McOsker told his colleagues.
Councilmember Ysabel Jurado, who joined the council in December, also defended the budget plan, saying it would help create “a more just, equitable and inclusive Los Angeles.”
“This budget doesn’t fix everything. It doesn’t close every gap. But it does show a willingness to make some structural changes,” she said.
Bass aides did not immediately respond to inquiries about the council’s actions. A second budget vote by the council is required next week before the plan can head to the mayor’s desk for her consideration.
Bass’ spending plan proposed about 1,600 city employee layoffs over the coming year, with deep reductions in agencies that handle trash pickup, streetlight repair and city planning. The decisions made Thursday would reduce the number to around 700, said City Administrative Officer Matt Szabo, who helps prepare the spending plan.
The remaining layoffs could still be avoided if the city’s unions offer financial concessions, said Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky, who heads the council’s budget committee. For example, she said, civilian city workers could cut costs by taking four to five unpaid furlough days.
“My goal, my fervent goal and hope, is that labor comes to the table and says ‘We’ll take some furloughs, we’ll take some comp time off,’” Yaroslavsky said.
The city entered a full-blown financial crisis earlier this year, driven in large part by rapidly rising legal payouts, weaker than expected tax revenues and scheduled raises for city employees. Those pay increases are expected to consume $250 million over the coming fiscal year.
To bring the city’s budget into balance, council members tapped $29 million in the city’s budget stabilization fund, which was set up to help the city weather periods of slower economic growth. They took steps to collect an extra $20 million in business tax revenue. And they backed a plan to hike the cost of parking tickets, which could generate another $14 million.
At the same time, the council scaled back an array of cuts proposed in Bass’ budget. Over the course of Thursday’s six-hour meeting, the council:
* Restored positions at the Department of Cultural Affairs, averting the closure of the historic Hollyhock House in East Hollywood, protecting its status as a UNESCO World Heritage site.
* Provided $1 million for Represent LA, which pays for legal defense of residents facing deportation, detention or other immigration proceedings. That funding would have been eliminated under Bass’ original proposal, Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez said.
* Moved $5 million into the animal services department — a move requested by Bass — to ensure that all of the city’s animal shelters remain open.
* Restored funding for streetlight repairs, street resurfacing and removal of “bulky items,” such as mattresses and couches, from sidewalks and alleys.
Even with those changes, the city is still facing the potential for hundreds of layoffs, around a third of them at the LAPD.
Although the council saved the jobs of an estimated 150 civilian workers in that department — many of them specialists, such as workers who handle DNA rape kits — another 250 are still targeted for layoff.
“We took a horrible budget proposal, and we made it into one that is just very bad,” said Councilmember Bob Blumenfield, who represents part of the west San Fernando Valley. “It took a lot of work to do that, but it is better and we did save jobs. But the fundamentals are still very bad.”
