Los Angeles City Hall has a fiscal deficit of almost a billion dollars.
One of the budget-busting items is not entirely related to the general problem of the City Council and the mayor simply overspending, overpaying employees and failing to plan for a rainy day.
But the $289 million the city spends in a single year in legal settlements and jury verdicts certainly doesn’t help the budget balance.
In fact, it’s an absolutely economically insane jump from the $64 million in such payouts Los Angeles made just a decade ago. Even the 2022 figure was a relatively workable $91 million.
But now, slips and falls on the city’s monumentally disfigured sidewalks, plus, there is no denying, contemporary juries’ recent switch to freely awarding huge amounts to plaintiffs, have made the hit to taxpayers and the city’s insurance policies shoot through the budget roof.
The biggest chunk of payouts over the past five years were for ‘dangerous conditions’ — lawsuits singling out faulty city infrastructure, such as broken elevators — at 32%, followed by civil rights violations and unlawful uses of force at 18%, and traffic collisions involving city vehicles also at 18%,” as Noah Goldberg and Phi Do report in the L.A. Times.
Plus, while LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell can get defensive as he cares to about police tactics in the recent unrest over immigration raids, it’s awfully clear that there are going to be even more use-of-force payouts, given all the civilian injuries from so-called less-lethal police shootings.
We don’t doubt City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto when she says that juries are seemingly expressing their anger at city governments by awarding larger verdicts. And she fully acknowledges that broken sidewalks and general lack of infrastructure maintenance that officials tend to blame on structural budgetary problems ever since the 2008 recession are a large part of the problem.
A major issue is also greed. We understand the plight of someone stymied by an unsympathetic boss. What we don’t understand is awarding her $6 million in taxpayer funds, which an LAPD captain recently received. “Please understand that every dollar you award is your money,” she tells Angelenos.
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