At this time one year ago today, the polls closed and the voters entrusted me with the honor of serving as Mayor. I promised to get City Hall back to basics, focus on making our neighborhoods prosperous, safer, and more livable, and make our city the best run city in the nation. And I’m proud that with your help, we are changing L.A.
I’ve just returned from Washington DC, where earlier today I joined with the Secretary of Transportation and Senator Boxer to secure $2.1 billion to extend the Purple Line into the Westside. It’s something that will create thousands of jobs, cut traffic and reduce pollution, and it’s just one of the ways we’re advancing our back to basics agenda.
I also just received news that City Council has passed my first budget as mayor. It’s a balanced budget that restores city services and focuses spending on back to basics priorities. You can view the budget for yourself with easy-to-use visualization tools that show spending levels from department to program here.
We’ve made city government more responsive by opening the first-ever help desk at City Hall, followed by similar one-stop help desks in Van Nuys and South L.A. I’m continuing to walk door-to-door and hold open office hours to hear directly from the people I serve. And you can get service anytime, anywhere online. If you haven’t already, follow me at @ericgarcetti and @LAMayorsOffice or on Facebook here. You can ping any of those accounts with a question or service request and we’ll get on it right away.
We’re making our city safer with new technology to reduce emergency response times and investing in summer programs to give hundreds of thousands of kids safe places to go and stay on track when school is out. Our new Summer of Success initiative has doubled the number of summer jobs for youth and includes job skills training.
We’re being smarter about fixing our streets — our Neighborhood Blitz initiative has already hit every L.A. neighborhood once this year and we’re in the middle of our second cycle of repairs that are identified by working with local stakeholders and Neighborhood Councils, who know better than anyone what the priorities should be.
On Friday, we will open the new lane on the 405 months early because our office got personally involved to solve problems that cause delays.
I promised to reform DWP, and today we have a new DWP contract that reforms pensions and freezes salaries, and we are holding the line on water and power rates. You can show your support for these DWP reform efforts by signing my petition here.
And we are cutting business taxes, streamlining permits, and improving customer service to get businesses open and people hired.
Last year, we came together to bring change to Los Angeles. Now, let’s continue our partnership and grow our ranks so that our big city becomes the great city we know it can be.
Thank you for being by my side on this incredible journey.
-Eric