City’s budget gap compared to others’

As the City Council prepares to close a $9.7-million budget gap before July 1, similar cities throughout the state are confronting their own economic demons, all them attributable to massive drop-offs in property- and sales-tax revenues.

But the size of those demons varies, and in an analysis of six other cities, Glendale’s is relatively mild.

At a time when Glendale is flinching at program cuts and a handful of possible layoffs, cities such as Modesto and Chula Vista are in the process of cutting a combined 107 workers from their rolls, while Irvine is planning to dip into its reserves.

Nearly all of the cities have instituted, or are considering, a mix of across-the-board-departmental cuts, wage concessions, early retirement, layoffs, furloughs and use of reserve funds to balance significant budget gaps before the start of the new fiscal year on July 1, city officials said.

Mayor Frank Quintero said the assessment at a recent League of California Cities was relatively bleak. “The general consensus was that they were in dire straits and were having to make severe cuts to their workforce and services,” he said. “In Glendale, while things are very difficult, we are in much better shape than most of the other cities.”

Status and causes of the deficits

Of six California cities analyzed for this report — Irvine, Modesto, Santa Clarita, Pasadena, Chula Vista and Burbank, all in similar size to Glendale and located throughout the state — only Santa Clarita escaped a budget gap. Pasadena and Burbank had slightly lower deficits of $8 million and $7.2 million, respectively, compared with Glendale’s $9.7 million, but they are also significantly smaller. Burbank is nearly half the size of Glendale.

Similarly sized Modesto and Irvine saw shortfalls of $11 million and $14.8 million, respectively, while the slightly larger city of Chula Vista, which, at roughly 210,000 residents, is nearly identical in size to Glendale, is struggling to cope with a $20-million deficit.

Officials in Santa Clarita, which saw a slight decline in sales- and property-tax revenues, said the city escaped a budget deficit for the upcoming fiscal year’s $77-million general-fund budget thanks to a conservative spending record.