The City Council plans to keep a watchful eye on several areas of the budget it expects to adopt next week, especially the revamped recreation programming that now exists under the Community Services Department.
The nature of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic means that the rollout of phase one of the reimagined department is not likely to go as city officials had envisioned. Summer programming targeting both children and adults represents a particularly big question as Los Angeles County public health officials continue to lift restrictions imposed at the beginning of the pandemic.
“The COVID-19 impacts are really completely unknown at this point,” City Manager Marcella Marlowe said at the council meeting on June 5. “If you had asked me three weeks ago if, on June 5th, I would have thought we would have been as open in terms of retail and business in the community as we are today, I would have said no. Things are moving, in some ways, much quicker than we imagined a month ago.”
It’s for this reason that the proposed budget due to be approved Friday, June 26, reflects what would be planned during a “quote-unquote normal year,” according to Marlowe. This way, she explained, it will be more straightforward to pick out the economic impacts of the fallout and, more simply, council members will have a straightforward idea of how much a project or investment costs.
After a prior meeting that dove into the proposed operational budget, this session analyzed the capital improvements program as well as the Community Services Department.
“From a practical perspective, it seemed foolish to us to offer you suggestions on what the impacts might be when things are changing so rapidly, and it really is a significant unknown,” Marlowe said. “We do need to have a budget available in case recreation programs are available to open, and if it turns out that those are not available to open, then obviously those would be costs we would not expend and potentially revenue we would not generate.”
Mayor Gretchen Shepherd Romey remained critical of plans for the recreation division, which were developed by a combination of the Recreation Commission, a blue ribbon committee and surveys conducted by a third-party firm. The mayor said she felt the plan did not reflect the conclusions of residents on what the division should be.
“We haven’t changed anything,” she charged, warning against what she said were “false narratives” about the restructuring. “I have a real problem with the cost of the rec department continuing to grow despite the fact that the re-envisioning surveyed community and the community members wanted an emphasis on community events and other [active] adult classes and move away from other things. The direction given, we haven’t achieved it, and yet we’re going to spend more on our rec department than we ever have in the past.”
Vice Mayor Ken Ude argued that the proposed 2020-21 recreation budget — around $1.9 million — is smaller than the outgoing budget, but Shepherd Romey contended that was because some personnel costs had moved under the broader Community Services Department budget.
The council in particular focused on the recreation division’s summer swim program, which is now contracted out to USA Pools instead of being locally administered. The program previously operated at a $100,000 net loss to the city and is now budgeted at $39,000 — $26,000 for the contract and the remainder for pool rental from San Marino High School.
Councilman Steve Talt challenged Shepherd Romey’s assessment, saying a reduction in overall costs of a program as part of a phase one revamp was a “step in the right direction.”
“So, losing 100,000 is better than just losing 39,000? That’s a false narrative?” he asked rhetorically. “The community is making a decision as to how much of its treasury should be spent on something that’s positive for the community, and doing it in a way that allows our resources to be used as effectively and as financially thoughtful as possible.
“We’re losing less money going to a contract, and to me that’s the type of re-envisioning that the blue ribbon committee and the Recreation [Commission] this City Council wanted to see done,” Talt added.
Ultimately, the council left the recreation division’s budget as it was proposed, but the mayor reminded everyone that officials were likely to revisit the budget this coming year, not least because of the pandemic.
“I would like to also suggest that we look at this one on a more regular basis after budget season has concluded and get some cost savings and see if there can be some cost savings in here that more reflect” the situation, she said in her final remarks on the item.
Scrutiny of City Budget Likely Even After Passage
