Take our workers - please

Dumping laid-off city employees to the airport, port and DWP never seemed like a very good idea - just more thrashing around by a mayor and city council that haven't the foggiest idea of how to handle the fiscal mess they've gotten themselves into. Of the 1,000 L.A. workers who face layoffs, only 86 have been transferred to jobs at the three proprietary agencies (those three are run separately from the city). "We are part of the city family," says City Councilwoman Janice Hahn. "Go back and look to see how you can absorb some of these people." Trouble is, as reported by the Daily Breeze, LAX, the port of Los Angeles and the DWP all have their own problems. About the last thing they need is to take on hundreds of worker refugees to do goodness knows what.

The issue was briefly discussed Tuesday during the airport commission meeting, where the panel agreed that expenses must be kept low to pay for more than $5 billion worth of capital improvements over the next 10 years. "We're not in a position to have people working here that we don't need," said Airport Commissioner Walter Zifkin. "We would be doing a disservice to our responsibility by employing people here that we don't really need."

Meanwhile, things have gotten so desperate that Villaraigosa is using a Web survey to solicit ideas from plain-'ol Angelenos on how to fix the budget crisis. As I said, clueless.