Parks, Arts, Services Hard Hit by Proposed Cuts

This is the fourth in a series of articles that will look at how the proposed $353.7 million City budget will impact departments and the services they offer.

By Oliver Lukacs
Staff Writer

June 3 -- After school programs, parks, homeless services and the arts will feel the impacts of $5.6 million in cuts proposed by the Community and Cultural Services department to help bridge a $16.1 million gap in the City’s upcoming fiscal budget.

Unveiled during a series of City Council budget study sessions last week, the proposals include closing school fields during summer mornings and spring and fall evenings and scaling back dozens of City-funded art programs, including the popular Santa Monica Symphony. The cuts would also leave a $400,000 hole in the City’s social services safety net.

Council members expressed shock at the list of program reductions that -- along with eliminating the equivalent of nearly 13 full-time staff positions that would save $2 million over the next two years -- constitute the largest cuts made by any City department.

“I want to call out for an anesthetic. These are the most painful cuts that I’ve heard,” said Mayor Pro Tem Kevin McKeown. “By the looks on my colleagues’ faces, I think we’re all shocked at what this is going to mean.”

Older teens will find earlier closure hours at PAL. CREST families will get less City support for seven school events, and while the opening of the Memorial Park skate park is still rolling along, open hours will be reduced from seven to five days a week.

In addition, partial-day summer drop-in recreation programs and citywide summer trips for youth also would be canceled.

The most visible effects of the proposed cuts would be seen in the City’s parks, where there would be an additional loss of seven contracted park maintenance workers, said Barbara Stinchfield, who heads the Community and Cultural Services department.

Visitors to the parks can expect to see a drop in community and restroom maintenance, while basketball and tennis players will notice more cracks on the courts, Stinchfield warned. The City’s “limited” park fields will deteriorate due to a 75 percent reduction in renovation and a 25 percent cut in maintenance, she added.

Mulched areas will pop up to replace missing plants, the tree trimming cycle will be extended, pot holes from missing trees will linger longer than usual, and litter will go uncollected for longer periods of time, including in playgrounds on weekdays and holidays, Stinchfield said.

Mayor Richard Bloom said the condition of some of the City’s fields are “deplorable, just horrible,” and lamented the “deleterious effects on the state of the fields just when they were starting to get better.”

Stinchfield, however, cautioned that the city’s fields get three times the use of fields in other cities. Future restrictions on park hours, she said, might actually work to the City’s advantage.

Mayor Bloom requested that a long-term strategy be devised, maybe even considering artificial turf, and Councilman Ken Genser asked what cutbacks in park maintenance “are the ones that are going to cause pain, and which ones are just belt-tightening… we can live with.”

In addition to scaling back park maintenance, community celebrations -- such as the Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration, Celebrate America and the Santa Monica Festival -- would be “reluctantly” reduced or eliminated in the coming years, and senior day in the park would be eliminated in 04-05, when the budget gap is expected to widen to $20.2 million.

McKeown, a self-proclaimed “latchkey kid” who said he knows the value of after school programs, asked the department to come back with alternatives to the proposed cuts in youth programs.

“Cuts to youth are very hard to stomach, especially at a time when in our Pico Neighborhood we’re seeing some of what happens when we don’t have these programs in place,” McKeown said, referring to a recent string of shootings.

McKeown said he was concerned that with the economy in a funk and the City cutting back on social services at a time when they’re most needed, the human services division, which deals with the homeless, is being asked “to do even more with even less.”

But the proposed cuts, Stinchfield said, won’t have a “significant” impact on human services because “most of our cuts were not service-related cuts.

“It’s excruciating, but at least it is equitable across our programs and our grantees,” she said.

Councilman Robert Holbrook expressed his “shock and horror” at all the cutbacks. But he added that despite the half a million dollars in proposed cuts for human services, “We’re still very fortunate that we have those services, and many cities don’t have these services at all.”

The council also debated a new formula for allocating arts grants based, in part, on the size of the organization and the strength of the program.

Holbrook was concerned that the Santa Monica Symphony -- one of his favorites -- was getting shortchanged with only $12,500, when he said it had greater community impact than other programs.

The purpose of the grants, Stinchfield said, was to “foster traditional as well as emerging programs.” She suggested that the symphony, which might see fewer performances due to the cuts, could charge a cover.

“I know this is a sacred cow, these are wonderful performances, open free to the public,” Stinchfield said, “but as with many things, maybe a low cost fee could help subsidize it as well.”

Bloom suggested that the same strategy might be applied for Celebrate America next year. “It’s probably too late to charge people this year, but next year it’s something to talk about,” he said.

Holbrook welcomed the idea of trying to find ways to keep programs alive when the City Council hammers out the upcoming fiscal budget June 17.

“I don’t know what we’re going to do,” Holbrook said, “but I look forward to trying to find some solutions to these funding problems, especially those organizations who serve directly our community.”