LOS ANGELES — The City Council adopted a budget for the fiscal year beginning July 1 on Tuesday, closing weeks of hearings with a plan that spares most street-level services in Hollywood while trimming around their edges.
For the neighborhood, the practical results are narrow and specific. Street resurfacing money survived intact, which the council office representing much of Hollywood said would let crews repave several residential blocks that have been on a waiting list since before the pandemic. The urban forestry division kept its scheduled tree-trimming rotation, a line item that sounds dull until a limb comes down on a parked car. And the pothole crews that ran a well-publicized blitz this spring were funded for another year.
The cuts, where they landed, were quieter. Two branch libraries in and near Hollywood will drop their Monday and Wednesday evening hours, closing at 6 p.m. instead of 8, part of a systemwide reduction the library department described as a response to staffing shortages rather than a budget target. A proposal to add a second sanitation crew for the boulevard’s morning cleanup was studied and shelved.
“You learn to read these budgets by what isn’t in them,” said Priya Venkataraman, 39, who follows city finance for a neighborhood council and testified twice during the hearings. “Nobody stands up and cuts a library. They reduce hours, they leave a position open, they call it attrition. The block feels it eventually.”
Councilmember Alicia Rendón, whose district covers a large share of Hollywood, voted for the package and defended it afterward as a plan that protected basic maintenance in a tight year. She acknowledged the library reduction was unpopular and said her office would press the department to restore the evening hours if revenue improved in the fall.
The budget arrives against a backdrop the council could not fix with a vote. City revenue has been flat, in part because the film and television slowdown that has thinned crew work across the region has also thinned the tax receipts the city collects from production activity. Analysts who briefed the council in May warned that if the slump deepens into next year, this budget’s modest cuts could look generous by comparison.
Not everyone left unhappy. A coalition that has lobbied for years to fund sidewalk repairs won a small pilot program, enough to fix buckled walkways in front of a few dozen properties where tree roots have made the pavement impassable for wheelchairs. It is a fraction of the need, its organizers said, and it is more than they had last week.
The vote was 12 to 3. The three dissenters objected on opposite grounds — two said the plan cut too deeply, one said it spent too freely — which is roughly where the council’s budget debates tend to end up. The spending plan takes effect in three weeks, and the first repaved block in Hollywood, a stretch the council office would not yet name, is scheduled for August.