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Civic Circus with Ankur Patel breaks down local politics, with a weekly report on city, county, and state bureaucracies.

Massive budgetary holes are nothing new to Angelenos: two years ago the $450 million budget gap was addressed through the Early Retirement Program (ERIP), which allowed 2,400 city workers to retire up to 5 years early. That was supposed to save $1 billion in payroll costs by 2024, but giving out pensions and retiree healthcare earlier than scheduled came with a short term cost of $355 million. Because the city didn’t have that money in the first place, Mayor Villaraigosa and his allies persuaded the pension board to spread those costs over 15 years, boosting the city’s total liability to $600 million because of the added interest.

To deal with last year’s $350 million shortfall, the Executive Employee Relations Committee (EERC), controlled the Mayor and other political insiders, met behind closed doors with the representatives of the Police Protective League and the Coalition of City Unions – powerful unions that also provide campaign contributions. That meeting led to the deferring of employee compensation to 2014, conveniently after the next city election effectively preventing any meaningful debate about the perpetual fiscal crisis during the next mayoral election.

This year, as part of its efforts to reduce the projected $250 million deficit, the City will adjust some of its underlying assumptions about the cost of healthcare and the demographics of our two seriously underfunded pension plans, Los Angeles City Employee Retirement System (LACERS) and the Fire and Police Pension Fund (FPP). Basically by adjusting the cost of future healthcare down, the City will be able to lower its contributions to LACERS and FPP by $100 to $125 million.

Another strategy that the city is using this time around is simply not paying workers. Instead of police officers being paid time-and-a-half when they work overtime, officers have been accruing credit in an “overtime bank.” When Villaraigosa took office in 2005, each officer could bank up to 96 hours of unpaid overtime. Under the latest police contract, the maximum was increased to 800 hours. By mid-November, officers were owed a total of 1.5 million hours of overtime, worth $78 million. But the cap on LAPD overtime is scheduled to drop from 800 to 150 hours per officer in July 2014, one year after Villaraigosa leaves office. The next mayor will have to either compensate officers for any overtime in excess of the lower cap or make a decision to continue postponing payment.

Kicking the can down the road has the implicit support of most of our elected officials, as Controller Wendy Greuel and Council Members Eric Garcetti, Jan Perry, and Bernard Parks have all been silent. Not only do our officials push important decisions past elections, but the last three budget and finance committee meetings have been cancelled – the strategy remains postponing difficult decisions one week at a time

In a nutshell, the solutions that our elected officials have come up with revolve around not paying workers for as long as possible and sticking the bill to the next politician. The sleight of hand after sleight of hand has worked and might even work this time, but the shell game can only continue for so long…

A short aside: the city has been claiming that the Occupy LA encampment has added to its expenses: City Administrative Officer Miguel Santana has estimated $2.3 million in total costs, including $1.2 million on time-and-a-half overtime pay for police. But Santana also said that, more than $590,000 of those costs would have been spent regardless of whether there was an occupation.