Council Makes Few Changes in Riordan Budget : Finances: Officials add $30 million to $3.9-billion plan. Changes include 32 more traffic officers, expansion of domestic violence unit and retention of business tax surcharge.

The Los Angeles City Council on Monday voted to slightly modify Mayor Richard Riordan’s budget, adding 32 traffic officers, expanding a domestic violence unit in the city attorney’s office and retaining a $9.7-million surcharge on business taxes.

But in a $3.9-billion budget, the council’s changes were minimal.

The lawmakers agreed to spend only about $30 million more than Riordan had proposed during council budget deliberations that were completed--uncharacteristically--in one six-hour session.

The council found the money to pay for its larger spending plan by coming up with rosier revenue estimates, dipping into the city’s reserve fund to pick up $4.2 million and leaving the business tax surcharge in place.

Retaining the surcharge was arguably the council’s most significant disagreement with Riordan’s budget. “That was the big one,” said Deputy Mayor Michael Keeley, the mayor’s budget czar.

Eliminating the surcharge was intended to send a positive signal that Los Angeles is becoming more business-friendly, the businessman-turned-mayor had insisted.

But the council’s Budget and Finance Committee chairman, Councilman Richard Alatorre, said the tax was set to be reviewed by outside consultants to determine if it really affected business decisions on where to locate.

Until that study is completed, the tax should be retained, Alatorre and his budget committee colleagues argued. There also was sentiment among council members that no cuts should be made in the business tax unless the sanitation equipment surcharge levied on homeowners was reduced.

The council’s next step is to put Monday’s actions into a formal budget resolution, which probably will occur early next week, and send it to the mayor.

Riordan will have five days to veto items that he dislikes, and the council will have another five days to override--or uphold--any vetoes.

After six hours of budget deliberations on Monday, Keeley said it was too early to say how the mayor would react to the council’s changes. But, Keeley said, he sees “no big clashes, no hard feelings.”

(In fact, one reason for the size of the discrepancy between the mayor’s budget and the council’s was a council decision to pay cash for some computer equipment rather than acquiring it through a lease-purchase. That change alone accounted for $19 million of the difference.)

As City Administrative Officer Keith Comrie noted, the council changes represented less than one-tenth of 1% of the city’s total spending plan.

One clash was averted when the mayor and the council worked out a compromise on the issue of staff assistants in the Fire Department.

Riordan had called the 57 staff assistants--who act as aides to various chiefs--glorified chauffeurs and had sought to eliminate the positions to save $5.98 million. His proposal was strongly opposed by the department and by Fire Department unions.

But a compromise emerged Monday, sponsored by Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg, that funds the staff assistants for the first six months of the coming fiscal year, which starts July 1. The compromise gives the new fire chief, Bill Bamattre, six months to devise an alternative staffing plan to deal with the unpopular phaseout of the staff assistant positions.

One of the more dramatic moments at Monday’s session came when Councilwoman Rita Walters unleashed a diatribe against the mayor’s budget. She contended that it created a fiction that “all is right with the world.”

“This is accomplished with a lot of smoke and far too many mirrors, which serve to hide the precarious financial predicament this budget may eventually cause for the city,” Walters said.

The lawmaker, a frequent Riordan critic, indicated that her greatest concern was that Riordan’s budget placed too much emphasis on hiring more police and called for backdoor efforts at privatizing city services.

In fact, the Riordan budget called for adding about 600 new police officers.

Keeley said later that Walters’ privatization fears were exaggerated because the mayor’s efforts in this area have been “extremely modest” and that “we are not apologizing for our emphasis on police.”

“Ms. Walters had two bites of the apple to change the budget, and we see the results,” he said. Asked what those results were, he refused further comment. Others privately noted that Walters did little to reshape the budget.

Generally, the council raced through its deliberations. “The machine is frozen up because we’ve been moving so fast,” Diane Titus, the council’s minutes clerk, warned at one point, referring to the council voting machine.

“I can’t recall us ever approving the budget in one day,” Council President John Ferraro said.

Other council changes included:

* Adding 32 additional traffic officers, a move costing $1.35 million but offset by the $2.8 million in extra parking ticket revenues that the additional officers would generate.

* Adding 20 positions to the city attorney’s domestic violence unit, at a cost of $1.4 million.

* Spending $1 million to build pocket parks.

* Restoring 33 tree-trimmer jobs in the Bureau of Street Maintenance at a cost of $499,357.

* Spending $750,000 to begin a pilot sidewalk repair program and $500,000 to create two so-called zero tolerance graffiti zones--one on the Eastside, the other in South-Central Los Angeles. The city promises to remove graffiti in 24 hours in those zones.