Last week was a not very good, really sort of bad, actually terrible week of budget news for Long Beach residents.<\/p>\n
The Long Beach Unified School District board said they would be eliminating jobs for 54 classified employees and dropping contracts for a whopping 515 temporary employees at the end of the school year. This after syphoning operating reserves to make up a $44 million deficit in the last fiscal year.<\/p>\n
City management rang the alarm bell as well, saying it expects a $60 million to $80 million deficit as it begins planning the next general fund budget (that starts Oct. 1, 2026). A chunk of that is the result of fiscal 2025 ending $40 million in the red \u2013 double what was expected when the current year\u2019s budget was passed.<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s start with our beloved school district. For the last couple of decades, LBUSD has quietly been struggling to pay the bills as expenses rose while enrollment fell. And when it comes to school funding, it is all about enrollment.<\/p>\n
In California, the vast majority of K-12 school funding comes from the state. With some exceptions for the relative poverty or wealth of a particular school district, that state money is allocated based on the number of students attending class in an attempt to be at least sort of fair.<\/p>\n
Remember that these are operating funds, not building construction funds. That will be important in a bit.<\/p>\n
Schools across California have been suffering from enrollment declines as families had fewer children or moved to states where it didn\u2019t cost as much to live. For the last couple of decades,<\/p>\n
Long Beach has been hit particularly hard due to skyrocketing housing costs and a less than robust job market.<\/p>\n
In the early 2000s, Long Beach Unified laid claim to being the second largest unified school district in the state. In October 2003, enrollment maxed out at 97,550 students.<\/p>\n
By 2020, that number had dropped to 71,000; the expectation for next year is 59,000.<\/p>\n
Every day a student is in school is worth about $75 in state support. There are 180 class days in a school year. Multiply that by 38,000 or so.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s a lot of money, even after inflation.<\/p>\n
Clearly, fewer students mean fewer classes, which means fewer teachers. In lots of places, it means fewer schools.<\/p>\n
Sadly, it doesn\u2019t balance out in the budget books, and for a weirdly good reason. We keep trying to make our schools better for our kids. That has meant classroom assistants, librarians, music programs, nurses, etc. All those cool new swimming pools, high tech classrooms and the like you\u2019re paying for through your property taxes have to be maintained.<\/p>\n
LBUSD Superintendent Jill Baker called it a \u201cgrave situation.\u201d I didn\u2019t know she was a master of understatement.<\/p>\n
Downtown at City Hall, hearing that there\u2019s a structural deficit going into budget planning is pretty much an annual event. For the last decade or two, the dire warnings prompted a bit of caution, but when the dust settled the budget had been balanced with fairly little pain or service cuts.<\/p>\n
Chalk it up to good management \u2013 or to the fine art of lowering expectations and raising results.<\/p>\n
In a sad way, the twin blows of the George Floyd civil unrest and the COVID 19 pandemic made it a little easier to balance the city books. The civil unrest prompted a motivation to help the less fortunate among us, and the pandemic opened the federal spigots of recovery money.<\/p>\n
Those days are gone. The last of the recovery money was spent last year, and operating reserves were required to stem the 2025 red ink.<\/p>\n
Our city leaders say it\u2019s our fault \u2013 well, actually they say everyone is spending less money, so tax revenue has dropped off the cliff. A couple of sleight-of-hand attempts to get more tax money didn\u2019t work so well, and now we\u2019re facing the consequences.<\/p>\n
It should be noted that a huge share of the blame resides in Washington D.C. We have been operating our Health Department almost exclusively on federal and state grant money for decades \u2013 at least three decades I can personally attest to.<\/p>\n
Almost all that federal money \u2013 to us and to the state \u2013 has disappeared. A vindictive administration has cancelled money to pay for everything from HIV and STD services to flu vaccines. In one year, the city health department\u2019s operating deficit ballooned from $1 million to $14 million, with the general fund making up $10 million of the difference. The rest came in the form of cuts.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s still almost six months before Sept. 1 and the budget crunch time. No doubt our brain trust will find ways to make the books balance, hopefully without actually cutting cops, firefighters or other services.<\/p>\n
Oh, and that amphitheater under construction, along with all the great 2028 Olympics building plans, is being paid for from other pockets of money that couldn\u2019t be used to help the general fund anyway. We\u2019re told those will all help bring in more tax money to pay for our future services.<\/p>\n
Keep your fingers crossed. Mine are.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Last week was a not very good, really sort of bad, actually terrible week of budget news for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":8562,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[7,8462,8461,131,133,132,137,3738],"class_list":["post-206364","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-long-beach","tag-california","tag-grunion-opinion","tag-grunion-pinch-of-salt","tag-long-beach","tag-long-beach-headlines","tag-long-beach-news","tag-los-angeles-county","tag-the-grunion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206364","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=206364"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206364\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8562"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=206364"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=206364"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=206364"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}