City Forced to Take Hard Look at Steady Growth in Spending : Government: Progressive programs have won national acclaim. But revenues are down, and critics say it is time to ferret out waste and excess.

SANTA MONICA —  The local bus line has been cited nationally for excellence. The local cable television station won an Emmy last fall. Commitment to affordable housing, the homeless, the young and the elderly is unequaled in Southern California, or most anywhere else for that matter. Even the storm drains--which monitor runoff for petrochemicals and shut automatically--bring acclaim to Santa Monica.

For a city of 85,000 people--for a city of any size, really--Santa Monica’s achievements are something to behold. Unfortunately, so is its budget, now a plump $208.7 million, and, in the eyes of many, sorely in need of reining in. “Just how progressive do we have to be?” asked Donna Alvarez, a City Hall watchdog, referring to a budget that a lot of cities twice Santa Monica’s size would deem adequate.

In reaction to declining revenues and an unrelentingly bleak economic forecast, City Manager John Jalili is proposing reductions of $24.8 million in the 1992-93 budget--under review this week at City Council study sessions and scheduled for formal presentation to the council on June 23.

The new budget trims 60 positions citywide through attrition, but it manages to skirt layoffs. It would eliminate the Community Development Department by distributing its functions elsewhere and would reduce city allocations to public schools, the Santa Monica Pier Commission, and the Convention and Visitors Bureau.

Most strikingly, it brings to a screeching halt a decade of uninterrupted growth, which is not so terrifying in the view of some.

“I think the recession is a good time to look at this (budget),” said City Councilman Herb Katz. “I think there is waste.”

Defenders of Santa Monica’s yen to spend say it merely reflects the wishes of a progressive, reasonably affluent populace.

City Councilman Dennis Zane, whose tenure has spanned much of the expansion, said the city not only has an obligation to serve its residents but to serve as a role model for other communities. “It does cost money to lead,” he said. “But the quality of civilization you get (depends on) what you are willing to pay.”

But some are bothered by expenditures that seem to smack more of government excess than of quality civilization.

The current budget is flecked with allocations for $2,000 desks and $800 chairs. Virtually every department in the city has its own internal newsletter, and more than a few city officials have openly wondered who reads them. For the past year, an information counter at City Hall has been staffed by two full-time librarians at a cost of about $5,000 a month.

The mayoral travel allowance for next year is $8,000, a figure Mayor Ken Genser himself this week called “extraordinarily high.” He went on to suggest that it be lowered to $4,000 along with the allotments of council members, who were budgeted $4,693 each.

Although the amounts are comparatively small, some object to what they say is a pattern of routine approval of expenses--typically justified as “cost efficient”--as the budget grows larger.

“It’s one of the great myths of government that if you spend money, you save money,” said Graham Pope, an accountant and Santa Monica Chamber of Commerce official.

In some instances, Santa Monica offers almost textbook examples of how government can feed on itself.

In a city that already spends $1.1 million a year on the homeless and recently hired a full-time coordinator for homeless programs, the city’s special Task Force on Homelessness last April announced a plan to spend millions more. For many, the coup de grace was its request to establish a $35,600-a-year speakers bureau. Its intended mission: to tell other communities about the task force concept.

During an interview last month, Jalili recalled the birth of the arts division of the Culture and Recreation Department. First, local arts enthusiasts created an arts task force that promptly asked for a staff of three people, two of whom were hired. The division’s budget is now $250,000.

The highly touted Kids City youth-in-government program costs too. Started three years ago for $100,000 a year, the price tag is now $200,000 annually.

For Genser, one of the first signs that the bureaucracy might be spinning out of control came after a City Council discussion of traffic count formulas last year. The council voted to adopt San Diego County’s methodology but noted that it might be a good idea for Santa Monica to develop its own formula.

No further vote was taken, no allocation authorized, but that didn’t stop the city’s Land Use and Transportation Department.

A consultant was hired, a study was commissioned, and a year later the department dutifully submitted a $25,000 analysis of traffic at six local office buildings.

Said Genser: “This is one of the first (expenses) that really, clearly hit home that something is wrong.”

In the opinion of many people, another indication that something is wrong is the city attorney’s office, where Robert M. Myers presides over a $3.6-million budget and the equivalent of 43.5 full-time employees. By contrast, the city attorney in Torrance, a community of 136,000 people, has a staff of 18 and a $1.7 million budget.

Myers and others argue that Santa Monica defies comparison with most similarly sized communities. The pier, the bus system and the airport all create legal work, as do the city’s consumer affairs, fair housing and other programs. Currently, the city is defending itself against more than 200 lawsuits, and it continues to prosecute all misdemeanors--as required by the City Charter--rather than turn them over to the county, as many localities do.

Consequently, Meyers not only denies that his department is overstaffed, but he pleads the opposite, noting that since a year ago his office is down three full-time deputy city attorney positions, a legal secretary and a legal assistant.

The new austerity is creating problems for almost everyone. The Pier Commission, now budgeted at $511,000, will be trimmed to $383,000 under the new budget. The Bayside District Corp., which manages the Third Street Promenade at a cost to the city of $592,000 annually, would be cut to $425,000. The Neighborhood Services program would be pared by $53,000 to $370,000 and the city’s allocation to the Santa Monica Malibu Unified School District would drop from $2 million to $1.8 million.

Some of the cuts hardly seem Draconian, but compared to the expansion of past years, they mark a wrenching turnaround.

For example, the department that manages Santa Monica’s extensive social services umbrella, Community Development, spent $5.6 million in 1989-1990. This year it was $7.7 million. The Land Use and Transportation Department--due largely to heavy reliance on outside consultants and innumerable requests for studies from city boards--spent $5.7 million this year, up from $4.2 million a year ago.

Meanwhile, the Cultural & Recreational Services budget jumped from $5.4 million to $7.4 million during the past three years, due largely to improvements to parks, tools and equipment that city officials insist were long overdue.

The Police Department’s budget, which increased from $20.1 million last year to $22.4 million in the current fiscal year, would continue to expand, however. The proposed allocation for next year is $24.3 million, due in part to the planned addition of 20 officers.

For virtually everyone else, however, the boom finally has gone bust. At a budget meeting this week, City Finance Director Mike Dennis warned that Santa Monica may still be feeling the fallout of the recession well into the 1993-94 fiscal year.

That, say city officials, may require still more cuts, assuming the City Council makes any this time.

As Jalili admonished the panel in March, “Every time we prepare to cut social services, we actually end up adding expenditures.”