[imtringued]

I'm not sure I understand your argument. You can defer maintenance but school, police, firefighter, etc spending is constant. If your infrastructure is in trouble and your budget can't pay for the maintenance, you can limit the costs to 5% or 10% of the budget, but your infrastructure will continue decaying.

Los Angeles has about 7500 miles of roads. At a reasonable cost of $5 million per mile that is 37.5 billion USD. Assuming a lifespan of 35 years, that is basically a billion USD per year spent on servicing road infrastructure costs. If they don't spend that billion every year or put it aside for future repairs, their road infrastructure is going to decay. It might not sound like much in comparison to the full budget, but since the road network is the largest man made structure in the city, it will affect everyone and be the most noticeable failure on part of the government. Lack of police or fire fighting can show up in the form of stochastic damage that doesn't necessarily impact every citizen directly.

[ndriscoll]

Sure, if you treat all other things as impossible to tweak except the thing you want to argue is the problem, I guess. But taking a quick look at the city budget, I see they spent $200M on overtime for police. So there's a place where they could save like $70M with no change to service with correct staffing? I'm sure there are other places where they are not currently 100% efficient. Or, since they have ~4M residents in the city, they could raise taxes by $250/person-year. That doesn't sound unsustainable to me. Certainly not a "suburbs are a fundamentally broken model" level problem.

Lots of suburban cities in the US are really nice, well run places. LA even as an example of a poorly run area doesn't actually seem to be in much of a financial pickle.

The point is

> you can limit the costs to 5% or 10% of the budget, but your infrastructure will continue decaying

Is just confused. The $1B/year you came up with as sufficient is ~7% of the LA city budget (~$14B), and that's excluding major expenses like schools since that's the county budget. If you look more holistically at just "what's the local government spending", the amount you say is needed to properly maintain the roads is more like 3-4%. Roads are just not a financial problem. Strongtowns guy just doesn't like them.

[danudey]

Overtime for police can often be largely attributed to special events or occasions; for example, the city might have an entirely correct amount of officers for most of the year, but then during superbowl, presidential visits, Fourth of July parties, Pride, etc. They have a much higher need for patrol units, escorts, traffic management, etc. for those denser areas with more going on. They can't simply transfer officers around because that would leave other areas of the city under-patrolled, which runs the risk of unacceptably higher response times.

As a result, officers that worked Saturday through Thursday might also come in for a shift on Friday/Saturday, or might work a longer shift or split shift that day.

So the problem might not be that the police force needs 30% more staffing, but that the police force needs 80% more staffing on extremely rare occasions.

[stinkbeetle]

This is how lobby groups in general operate. They have settled on a solution and work backward from there to develop a problem that only their solution can fix and if other citizens and voters don't like it, they are the problem (NIMBY, greedy, selfish, populism, etc).

[xethos]

Just a note about police overtime: The correct amount of overtime for a union employee is not zero. Paying overtime for a few weeks each year to cover vacation can absolutely be cheaper than funding a pension and other benefits for several decades.