What did he say?

I finally got around to reading the transcript of Villaraigosa's meeting the other day with LAT editors and reporters. It's only a partial transcript, but I found it more than a bit sobering. Now, we all realize that the mayor isn't exactly a wordsmith, but the city does happen to be in the worst financial emergency since the Great Depression. It would be nice for him to articulate to Angelenos - plainly and succinctly - how we got into this mess, what he plans to do about it, and whether there's any way to avoid it from happening again. Nothing unreasonable about that. So I ask you: Is there a complete sentence in sight? Is there a complete thought in sight?

Nick Goldberg, L.A. Times: Let me start this out by asking you a little bit about how you're going to get that done. I mean, last year, as I understand it, you guys went in and arranged an early retirement deal, and my understanding is that it took so long to work it out, it took so long to get the program underway that a lot of savings were lost. What can you do? ... What are you going to do this year? How are we going to get this done? What's going to keep the dickering and bickering from holding this off?

Villaraigosa: You can write whatever you want here, and again, I'm not going to go off the record because I'm just going to say what -- I hope you don't put too much of the strategy in there, but you guys write whatever, I'm not going to tell you not to -- but look: I negotiated the early retirement program. CAO comes in, he tells me, "This doesn't cost out. What are you doing? You gotta kill it." I did; he then negotiated the early retirement. He comes back to me; I said, "Hey, you're the one who told me mine was no good. What, yours isn't much better." I said I'd veto it, if you remember, he had to make $78 million in concessions, they had to go to 7%. All of that, while it was important to do, and you editorialized that it's important to remove as many of these people as humanely as possible, it also had to pay for itself. And as you know, all we paid for was the incremental cost. It is more expensive to ERIP than to lay off.

So while we did that once, and we may even do that for the other 360 employees if they pay the incremental cost, and right now they're saying they won't pay the incremental cost, what we're saying is, we can't keep ERIPing here. The fact is we can't afford that either.... I want to do this humanely, but I also -- there is a bottom line here. So it took us way too long.

Now I believe -- I'm the one that brought in win-win bargaining, as you know, and I believe in it. But in a crisis, the win-win bargaining just, it's like, molasses, and we can't afford to wait that long. What we didn't have, because we didn't know I could last time. You're probably thinking someone's going to ask, "How come you're ordering layoffs now and you didn't order them before?" I'll tell you why: Because last time, it was in the context of negotiations. You have to have an MOU, the council has to approve the MOU. With my new lawyer that just came on board, we found out, hey, guess what, you actually have the power through your general managers to order layoffs and not go to the council.

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Robert Greene, L.A. Times: Mayor, some people have described the layoffs, the cuts, et cetera, as right-sizing the city, the implication being that for a long time the city had a payroll that it shouldn't have had, that it was performing services that it shouldn't. And there were other people who described it as a crisis, the implication being that after a set period of time, the economy recovers, we can begin to rebuild and do the things that we were doing before. What is your view of it? Which way are we going?

Villaraigosa: Is that when you guys editorialized on that? And you said that I should have said I should have some number about what the right size is. Hey, the CAO doesn't have it, the CLA doesn't have it. I don't know why I should have it. I don't know what that right number is, because frankly, as I understand it, we're not that much bigger for the number of people we have. Our budget is not that bigger, the size of our employee force as I have been told by the CAO and others. But I don't, because you said, "Well, he doesn't know," do you know what that number is? No, none of us do.

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Villaraigosa: The CAO doesn't know. We don't -- here's an example: To do the job the way, I mean, one could argue that we don't have enough employees to do all the potholes, even though I've tripled and almost quadrupled of the previous administration, all the left-hand turn signals, all the - which I've done three or four times as well.... The answer is, maybe you're right, maybe I should know. Go ask (Chicago Mayor Richard M.] Daley, go ask [New York City Mayor Michael] Bloomberg if they know. I don't know anyone who knows what that right number is. I do know this: One thing that will happen when we downsize the size of this workforce, we'll see what the implications are, what the impacts are. So that's one way we're going to find out. We're going to find out that in some places the cuts were too deep, and in other cases, more than likely, they were able to handle them.