In LA’s most recent round of budget cuts last week, the mayor’s office, the city council and the office of city attorney Carmen Trutanich, all had another $1 million cut from their respective bottom lines.

As one might imagine, no one is very happy about this newest bout of fiscal slashing.

However, Mr. Trutanich has responded to the cut with a move that critics say is designed to throw a retaliatory punch at the mayor and the city council at the expense of the needs of the city and its police force.

Specifically, Trutanich has abruptly shut down all the CA’s branch offices citywide—most notably in Van Nuys, Hollywood and San Pedro. This means that LAPD detectives from, say, the department’s various Valley and Harbor divisions, who would normally file misdemeanor criminal cases at those city attorney satellites with comparative efficiency, will have to spend hours driving to and from downtown instead— longer in rush hour traffic. To make matters worse, the detectives worry, the downtown offices will likely be plagued by a processing pile up due to the sudden centralization. Thus cops will have to add waiting time to their new extra driving time.

City Attorney Trutanich told Eric Leonard of KFI radio on Monday that, indeed, “downtown is now where all filing takes place.

“Somebody has to say – you know what - we’ve cut enough out of public safety,” Trutanich added. “It makes no sense to have 10,000 police officers and not be able to complete a prosecution.”

But many of the detectives who will be the most affected by Monday’s district office shuttering strategy believe that other less harmful cuts could be made and worry that Trutanich is simply using the move to play hard ball with the city council—at the expense of public safety.

While the city attorney makes his political point, they say, a large swath of LA’s already overstretched police force is going to have to spend precious hours driving and waiting, waiting and driving—when that same time could and should be spent….you know… policing.

There are assuredly more rounds to go in this fight. So stay tuned.

NOTE #1: I began reporting this story late in the day, thus by the time I tried to call the city attorney’s office for comment, it was exactly 6:01 pm. I knew I would likely not find Mr. Trutanich’s public information officer still at work, but I assumed that—as is the policy with most other PIOs for public figures and government agencies—the city attorney’s guy would have a cell-phone number or some other after hours form of contact to accommodate reporters on deadline. Alas, he did not.

NOTE #2: LOOKING FOR AN ANTIDOTE TO THE CABLE TV TALKING HEADS WHEN YOU WATCH TONIGHT’S STATE OF THE UNION MESSAGE?

Try KCET’s SoCal Connected, which goes live at 6 pm.

The show’s anchor Val Zavala will be joined by panelists Larry Elder, Patt Morrison, and SoCal Connected correspondent Brian Rooney—a good line up.

The live broadcast will also stream in real-time at www.kcet.org/socalconnected. Viewers are invited to offer feedback online during the broadcast at KCET’s FaceBook page, plus Twitter posts will air throughout the coverage.

Sounds good to me.

Really, all we’re asking for is a little of the much promised transparency and accountability.

It’s a season of ongoing budgetary nightmares. LA’s libraries are losing one-third of their staff. Even the city’s firefighters are taking budget hits. However one of the few programs or agencies in all of Los Angeles that has not seen its funding slashed is the city’s $26 million plus Gang Reduction and Youth Development program—or GRYD.

This is not to suggest that the city doesn’t need every penny of that GRYD money. Even after LA’s drop in crime, Los Angeles is still the gang capital the nation. Gang violence takes lives, wrecks futures, fills prisons and causes staggering levels of measurable PTSD in school-age kids who live in gang-intense neighborhoods.

In truth, $26 million is not all that much considering the gravity and complexity of the problem.

Yet the very scarcity of funds is a big part of the reason why the community at large deserves to know exactly what we’re getting for our prevention/intervention millions now that we are two years into the mayor’s GRYD strategies—which is precisely why WitnessLA and Spot.Us have hired Matt Fleischer to find out under the banner of the LA Justice Report.

Matt’s been digging up a lot very intriguing information already. (The fruits of his labors will appear later this summer.)

But, as he digs and explores, it has been a bit vexing to find that the least cooperative people have been those in the mayor’s GRYD office.

Take for example the issue of the evaluation:

As part of its mandate, GRYD has contracted with the Urban Institute to conduct an evaluation of the various GRYD programs’ for performance and efficacy—for a fee of $900,000. The gang programs were officially moved to the mayor’s office in July of ‘08 and here we are in late June of 2010. Yet, thus far we can find no one outside of GRYD who has seen any part of any kind of an evaluation.

And GRYD ain’t sharing.

In fact, every time Matt asked for any information whatsoever regarding the UI evaluation city officials switched on their vague-afiers.

It was in draft form, they said, so they couldn’t give him that.

Now, granted, the evaluation is a 3-5 year project, which means that every interim report is, by definition, a “draft” until 2013 or 14 or whatever, when there will be a final report. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t reports at the one year mark. Surely GRYD wants to know—and would want us to know—that they are on the right track with their $26 million worth of gang violence prevention and intervention strategies. Matt said that a draft of the evaluation would fine. Anything would be better than nothing. At this, the GRYD people remembered urgent business elsewhere and stopped replying to his requests altogether.

Just out of curiosity, I called a contact who is an insider at the LA City Council. I reasoned that since the council is responsible for approving all GRYD’s city funds, surely a well-placed person in the council offices could get some kind of interim evaluation at this point. Nope, they’d asked for it, he said. And so far, nada.

“The council gets quarterly reports,” he said, “but they don’t say much.

He reminded me that one of the selling points for moving LA’s gang dollars away from the city council and putting the money all under the single roof of the mayor’s office was to insure that the program would be more accountable and transparent than the city’s previous gang violence reduction programs had been. (cough) LA Bridges (cough, cough).

“Well, the mayor is two years into having all the money, and we’ve not seen a lot of either transparency and accountability,” he said grumpily. “They aren’t very good at collaborating either. As a result, if you as a taxpayer ask me what you’re really getting for your money, I can’t really tell you.”

Okay, we aim to change that. That’s what Matt’s reporting for WLA and Spot.Us is all about.

IMPORTANT NOTE: You can do another round of free “donations” to Matt’s investigation for WLA the LA Justice Report by doing the following:

* going to Spot.Us
*Login/Register on Spot.Us (upper left hand side.)
* hit the EARN CREDITS button
*answer three anonymous questions about how reporters and techs might better collaborate.
*scroll down and choose the LA Justice Report when you’re prompted to select how to use your credits.
*hit the APPLY CREDITS
*Then confirm it at the prompt.

That’s it. You pay nothing, and our reporting fund gets ten bucks!

The Los Angeles City Council approved much of mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s proposed budget on Monday afternoon.

Library hours were cut, day care eliminated, 761 city positions were slashed-–with a possible road back on some of the jobs if unions will approve a five percent pay cut to their employees. For the moment, however, the LAPD is guaranteed a sworn force of 9,963 officers.

Rick Orlov reports for the Daily News:

Villaraigosa also sent a somber message to the council, praising them for their efforts, but saying more needs to be done. “We can do better than the budget I originally proposed, but we cannot do it without significant structural cost-saving measures from our labor partners,” Villaraigosa said, adding he wanted to also move ahead with pension reform. Union leaders said they were not prepared to make any further reductions in their pay, saying their workers had passed on pay raises last year and for this coming year.

City officials, however, said without concessions workers will face layoffs or 16 to 26 furlough days. Rough projections show that if all city workers, including police and fire, take a 5 percent cut, the city could save $123 million. If only civilian workers take a 5 percent reduction, it would mean $63 million in savings.

Council member Tony Cardenas and Richard Alarcon managed to find away to put back into the budget money to keep Northeast Valley Animal Shelter and to replace the $1.3 million in cuts from the city’s gang intervention and prevention funding that had been marked for slashing.

However, both Antonio Villaraigosa and some of the council members attempted to delay the vote to allow time for further union talks. Yet the majority prevailed.

The LA Times reports about the ploys to avoid taking the vote:

Opponents of the cuts tried to circumvent the vote by adjourning the meeting ahead of schedule. That proposal failed on a 9-6 vote. Alarcon, Huizar, Hahn, Wesson and council members Paul Koretz and Paul Krekorian voted in favor of adjournment.

David Zahniser and Phil Willon have more.

THE GUTSY LESBIAN GIRL, THE CREEPY FAUX PROM, AND THE SOMEWHAT HAPPIER ENDING

A new chapter just occurred in the case of Constance McMillen, the Mississippi teenager who made national news when she was forbidden to take her lesbian girlfriend to her high school prom. (She was also forbidden to wear a tux to the prom and told she had to wear a dress—demonstrating that the school is not only mean and discriminatory, but also fashion clueless.)

Constance did not quietly go away, but challenged the school’s policy. And the ACLU backed her up. (Go, Constance!)

When faced with a possible discrimination lawsuit, Itawamba Agricultural High School got freaked and canceled the official school prom.

After a federal court ruled sorta for McMillen, saying she should have been able to bring her girlfriend, a private prom was scheduled—which then saw fit to adopt the same no-same-sex-dates-or-girls-in-tuxes rules. It too was canceled.

There was still more kerfuffle and prom three—another private prom—was scheduled. It looked like there would finally be a happy ending.

But when McMillen and friend and a couple of kids with disabilities showed up at the local country club for Prom 3, they found that they were alone. The event was a decoy prom. All the other Itawamba promsters were at Prom 4, a private, parent-organized no lesbians invited prom.

When this news broke, a number of writers found themselves thinking really mean thoughts about the kind of adults who would pull such a fantastically creepy stunt.

Finally, this Friday, the AP has reported that Constance and date are invited to a gala dinner dance in San Francisco organized by The National Center for Lesbian Rights and to be held on May 1.

The group is paying to fly Constance and date in to SF and their executive directer has said the NCLR plans to give her “a weekend she’ll never forget. It will make all these other proms and fake proms fade into distant memory.”

Good. Hope so. She’s earned it.

THE MAYOR DITCHES THE FURLOUGHS, FINDS NEW CITY BUCKS, MAKES NICE WITH THE COUNCIL…WHILE CITY HALL WATCHERS GET MOTION SICKNESS & THROW UP ON THEIR SHOES

Is it me or are the rest of you suffering from fiscal whiplash with this latest news?

It seems that—surprise—the city doesn’t have to renege on its bills, or close itself down for four out of every seven days of the week, or dress up in thigh-high bad girl boots to solicit funds on darkened, grungy street corners. (Okay, that wasn’t literally mentioned, but close.) On Thursday the mayor looked again through his figurative sock drawer and found a wad of money stuffed way at the back corner—and we were saved! Saved, I tell you!

Or something like that.

Maeve Reston at the LA Times has the details.

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has backed away from his call to shut down some city departments two days a week, using positive news about the city’s budget crisis to downplay a threat that had become increasingly difficult to sustain.

“To all of our surprise, we’ve gotten an increase in revenues of $30 million more from property tax than we expected,” Villaraigosa said Thursday, two days after announcing the move might be necessary as soon as Monday to prevent the city from running out of money.

With the unexpected revenue and the City Council’s budget-balancing moves, “We might not be out of cash after all,” the mayor said.

Uh, Mr. Mayor, we’re really glad it worked out and all that. But, given the events of the past couple of days, we also feel a little bit, you know, jacked around.

Read the rest.

THE LA TIMES WEIGHS IN ON THE FED COURT’S NET NEUTRALITY DECISION

I’ve been meaning to post on this all week. Glad the LA Times spoke up on the matter. Here’s the opening of Friday’s editorial:

A federal appeals court reined in the Federal Communications Commission this week, ruling that it overstepped its authority when it penalized Comcast for surreptitiously disabling a popular technology that let people share files online. But the ruling did not quell the commission’s interest in regulating the way Internet service providers such as Comcast manage their networks. Instead, it set up a potential fight over whether the commission’s regulatory authority should be expanded, either by Congress or the commission itself. We think the best course is for lawmakers to give the FCC clear but limited power to preserve the openness that has made the Internet not just a hotbed for innovation but also the most important communications medium of our time.

At issue is “net neutrality,” which is the idea that companies selling high-speed Internet connections should treat all legal websites and online offerings equally.

Read on. This is a vitally important issue.

Meanwhile, the FCC strikes back after the fed court decision.

Zach Behrens of LAist hung in to cover Monday’s 11-hour marathon budget committee meeting and reports on what cuts the committee recommended, and which it turned down flat.

Thus far LA’s Cultural Affairs Department, which was scheduled for the ax, was thankfully spared. (The full City Council will look at the budget on Wednesday.)

But, judging by his Tweets, by meeting’s end Zach was getting a little punch drunk. (Can’t say that I blame him.)