Say Anything Blog

The city of Los Angeles isn’t in any better financial condition than the state of California…that is broke. Despite the city being unable to meet basic obligations for local taxpayers, the city government was able to find millions of dollars to pay for police overtime to help send off the King of Pop.

(LA Times) Hours after the last eulogy to Michael Jackson bounced off the rafters of Staples Center, discussion in Los Angeles civic circles turned to more down-to-earth matters: Were the pop star’s death and memorial a net fiscal loss or gain to the city, and should taxpayers get stuck with the tab?

City Atty. Carmen Trutanich said this week that he was investigating how the city ended up with a $1.4-million bill.

$1.4 Million is the number that the city is using. Some say the actual cost may be as high as $4 Million.

A lot of attention has been paid to some box lunches.

Some argued that it didn’t matter—the city would get its money back, and more, as a result of the global attention focused on Los Angeles for the better part of a week.

But the new city controller, Wendy Greuel, seemed more concerned with the $48,826 that the Emergency Management Department spent on 3,500 boxed lunches from Jensen’s Finest Foods in Wrightwood, in San Bernardino County. The lunches were intended for emergency personnel at the Jackson memorial, but Greuel thought it seemed excessive, especially after her staff called a nearby Subway and was given an estimate of $17,491 for the same number of lunches.

She sent a stern letter to the head of the department, James Featherstone, criticizing the cost. She added: “It would have been preferable to make this purchase from a business located in the city of Los Angeles, as opposed to nearly 80 miles away.”


Featherstone defended the expenditure. He said the city has used Jensen’s for years because the company is able to prepare thousands of lunches on short notice, and the meals were costly because they contained enough food to keep police and firefighters going for 12 to 15 hours—two sandwiches, two drinks, a packaged dessert, a candy bar, trail mix, chips or crackers, a granola bar and a pack of gum.

There are a few voices asking taxpayers to see the $ Millions as an investment in Los Angeles.

Carol Schatz, president and chief executive of the Central City Assn., said the memorial was actually a mixed bag, economically.

“All the downtown hotels were close to being full as a result of the service,” she said. “However, it did not spill over to the restaurants, especially on the day of the service, because so many businesses fearing these enormous multitudes had their employees stay home.”

Still, she said the memorial was “worth its weight in gold” for the attention it brought to “the new downtown that we’ve created in the last 10 years.”

Taking that argument a step further, Joel Kotkin, presidential fellow at Chapman University in Orange, said that Jackson’s death and memorial helped “brand” the city and would have lasting economic value.

“If there is a positive,” he said, “it’s that it sort of reconfirmed L.A.‘s status as a capital of pop music, celebrity, and lunacy. . . . That’s infinitely more important than a one-day event.”

Now that Los Angeles has captured the title as the nation’s capital of lunacy, what will San Francisco have to do to reclaim the mantle?

The LA Daily News is reporting that the taxpayers are on the hook for nearly $4 Million in city costs.

A City Council member took issue today with the mayor's office's contention that the total cost to the city resulting from the Michael Jackson memorial would be $1.4 million, saying it could be more than twice that amount.

Mayoral spokesman Matt Szabo wrote in a post on the mayor's Twitter page Wednesday that the total cost to the city was "far less than expected" at $1.4 million.

But Councilman Dennis Zine said in a telephone interview aired on Fox 11's "Good Day LA" this morning that the sum cited by the mayor's office pertained only to the extra costs incurred by the Los Angeles Police Department.

He said the amount did not include the costs resulting from the activities of the Department of Transportation, Bureau of Street Services and the Fire Department. Nor does it reflect the costs attached to the weekend deployment of city employees who helped with pre-memorial planning and to the installation of portable toilets near Staples Center.

Zine said the city's Legislative Analyst's Office estimates that the final cost to taxpayers could be more than $3 million.

The Analyst's Office had previously projected the possible cost to the city at $3.8 million.