Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa would continue his pursuit to add 1,000 officers to the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) despite the city's 406-million-dollar budget shortfall, The Los Angeles Times reported on Monday.
To continue the LAPD expansion in the midst of an economic downturn, Villaraigosa has called for reductions in library hours and supplies, animal shelter hours, park rangers and maintenance, summer recreation workers and arts programmes.
Hiring so many new officers is much trickier when home sales are flat, sales taxes are down and city employee pay raises have cost nearly 90 million dollars extra with each successive year, the paper noted.
With another grim year expected in 2009-10, the budget woes pose a major question for the mayor: Even if he reaches his goal of 1,000 new officers, could that rapid build up -- his No. 1 priority -- be sustained? the report asked.
Three years into his term, Villaraigosa has his hard-fought goal of 1,000 new officers squarely within his sights. The LAPD would have added more than 800 by next year, just as the mayor asked voters to re-elect him. And the number would reach 1,000 during the start of a second term, assuming he is re-elected, according to the report.
That initiative is coming at an increasingly steep price. In Villaraigosa's proposed 2008-09 budget, the cost of the police expansion is about 73 million dollars, equal to nearly one-fifth of the city's budget shortfall.
Next year, the cost of the LAPD build up is expected to reach 114 million dollars -- equivalent to nearly 40 per cent of the budget shortfall projected for that year, 293 million dollars, said the report.
Those figures do not take into account the additional employees needed to support the new officers -- payroll clerks, training officers and maintenance crews.
The city's top budget officials are trying to determine, once those costs are factored in, whether the trash fee increase would cover the total cost of the build up, the report said.

As recently as February, Villaraigosa warned that any slowdown in officer hiring would be greeted by his veto pen. And his advisors sound exasperated with pleas to slow police hiring or protect other programmes from cuts.