YOUR TWO CENTS' WORTH; RESIDENTS SHOULD BECOME INVOLVED IN HOW THE CITY SPENDS IT TAX DOLLARS.

Byline: Michael Feuer 

HOW would you spend the city's tax dollars? Residents of Pacoima answered that question at a recent neighborhood meeting of the City Council's Budget and Finance Committee.

The evening kicked off a unique series of hearings throughout Los Angeles that will open the city budget process to the public. Until now, shaping the budget has been a privilege reserved mostly for City Hall insiders.

The budget itself is a series of complex documents totaling well over 1,000 pages. The mayor proposes a new budget in late April, the council reviews it in May, and the budget is complete by early June.

With residents left out until the final days of public hearings downtown, it's no wonder many feel there's little reason to care about all that number crunching.

Yet the budget matters enormously because it expresses our civic priorities, and though the process may look dull, it includes often controversial choices that affect the quality of life on every block in Los Angeles.

It's time we engaged residents in setting budget priorities. This will begin in earnest when the neighborhood councils - called for in the new City Charter - are in effect. The councils will have an official advisory role in establishing the city's fiscal goals.

As the new chair of the council's Budget and Finance committee, however, I want to set an example for inclusion and constructive citizen involvement starting right now.

That's why I decided to take the budget process on the road and ask residents how they would choose to spend $1 million of taxpayer funds on city services.

Sure, most residents would like more of just about every service. The point of the survey is to see which ones they want most, once they know the unit costs of services and are confronted with the reality of limited resources. The exercise makes clear that these choices are often difficult, and the stakes are high.

For instance, residents could add a paramedic ambulance staffed 24 hours per day for $600,000; an extra police patrol eight hours per day for $300,000; and also keep their local library branch open an additional 12 hours per week for $100,000.

Or, to take another example, they might allocate their $1 million to resurfacing 2-1/2 miles of streets for $300,000; trimming 4,500 trees for $250,000; adding an animal control team for $400,000; expanding recreation programs for $34,000; and providing each of 10 senior citizens with a meal five days a week for $16,000.

Notwithstanding that four essential city services - police, fire, paramedic and sanitation - consume nearly 75 percent of the city's unrestricted funds, there still is meaningful discretion involved in shaping the budget each year.

For example, as a result of shifting priorities, the city will pave 450 percent more streets this year than in 1990. We also will employ 3,000 fewer civilian staff than at the beginning of the decade, meaning some services have been reduced. In an era when government is expected to do more with less, there are lots of hard choices to be made.

But why, as one man asked during the Pacoima meeting, should city officials turn to the community for guidance? After all, don't residents pay city officials to be the experts?

Indeed they do, but expertise goes only so far. Ultimately, spending choices must reflect the specific needs and desires of communities and our collective aspirations for the city.

Those in government must take seriously the opinions of their employers, the taxpayers. Moreover, there is value in residents knowing that their representatives are listening carefully to their opinions. We need to forge a stronger bond between neighborhoods and City Hall, and there are few more significant issues than the way the city spends tax dollars.

Sometimes the views expressed will be provocative.

In Pacoima, a community troubled by gang and other crime problems, one resident after another praised the police, but wanted more money for youth and recreation programs to prevent criminal activity in the first place. That allocation necessarily would mean less funding for law enforcement, and the residents knew it.

Those opinions don't yet amount to a trend, and none of this relieves the mayor and council from ultimate responsibility for tough decisions. But already I can see the potential in transforming city budgeting into a much closer collaboration with our residents.

The Internet will help, too. Starting this year, the city's ``Budget on-line'' page (www.lacity.org/bgonline/index.htm) will provide a summary of the budget proposed by the mayor in April, along with regular updates during council budget deliberations. It also will allow residents to give their views to the council's Ad Hoc Committee on the City Budget as it does its work.

In addition, our new budget survey will be online within the month, allowing residents to submit answers from any Internet computer to the Budget and Finance Committee about how they'd allocate $1 million on city services.

We'll also take the survey to senior service centers, and to young students in civics classes.

Will these connections with residents help create the kind of city we all want Los Angeles to become? Attend one of our community budget hearings, or log on to the city's Web site, and let's find out.

CAPTION(S):

box

Box: Million dollar survey

This survey asks residents to pick the services most important to them. But remember you only have $1 million to spend.