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Mayor Eric Garcetti says thousands of L.A. city workers to be furloughed

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Los Angeles just got the bluntest budget warning in Eric Garcetti’s tenure as mayor.

Mayor Eric Garcetti used his 2020 State of the City address on the evening of Sunday, April 19, to tell Angelenos what the coronavirus shutdown has done to the city’s books. Speaking from City Hall ahead of his fiscal year 2020-2021 budget proposal, Garcetti said thousands of civilian municipal employees will be furloughed for 26 days over the coming fiscal year — roughly a 10% pay cut — on top of an ongoing hiring freeze meant to keep the city solvent.

The speech doubled as a plea to Washington. Garcetti argued that if the federal government could rescue banks during the 2008 recession, it can rescue cities now buckling under lost tax revenue and vanished tourism.

• Thousands of city workers face 26 furlough days in FY 2020-2021, amounting to about a 10% pay cut, alongside a continued hiring freeze.
• Passenger traffic at LAX has fallen 95%, a far steeper drop than the one-third decline the airport saw after the September 11 attacks — a slump that took a decade to fully recover from.
• Los Angeles has already borrowed roughly $70 million from reserve and special funds to cover emergency public health operations and expanded virus testing.

The Scale of the Shortfall

Garcetti didn’t soften the numbers. Municipal tax collections have cratered, hotel bookings have effectively disappeared, and the airport that anchors so much of the city’s economy is running at a fraction of capacity. He drew a direct comparison to the aftermath of 9/11, when LAX traffic dropped by a third and needed ten years to climb back — a benchmark he said the current collapse has already blown past.

To keep emergency operations funded in the meantime, the city has drawn down about $70 million from reserve and special funds, money that’s been going toward public health response and the expansion of coronavirus testing capacity across Los Angeles.

Furloughs Without Layoffs

The 26 furlough days are Garcetti’s mechanism for avoiding mass layoffs while still cutting payroll costs by roughly 10%. Combined with the hiring freeze already in place, the mayor framed the plan as an attempt to preserve essential city functions even as many departments are forced to run at sharply reduced capacity in the months ahead.

Garcetti compared the current downturn to the aftermath of the September 11 attacks — only far worse, and moving far faster.

An Appeal to Washington

Garcetti closed his address by pressing federal leaders for relief funds to backstop cities like Los Angeles, invoking the 2008 financial-sector bailout as the model he wants applied to municipal governments now. The request lands as cities and states nationwide have been pushing Congress for direct aid, a fight that has run alongside the broader debate over when the next round of federal stimulus might pass. It’s also part of a pattern playing out across the country, where state and local restrictions tied to the outbreak have forced officials to make similarly painful budget calls.

Garcetti didn’t put a dollar figure on what Los Angeles needs from Washington, but the ask was clear enough: without federal help, the furloughs and hiring freeze he announced Sunday night are likely just the first round of cuts, not the last.