Jun 13, 2009 7:10 pm US/Pacific
Officials Debate Cost Of Lakers Victory Parade
LOS ANGELES (CBS) ―
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Fans of the Los Angeles Lakers cheer their team at the championship victory rally in Los Angeles, California on June 14, 2002.
Scott Quintard/NBAE/Getty Images
City officials are balking at the million-dollar plus cost of a victory parade down Figueroa Street should the Los Angeles Lakers win the NBA championship.
With city workers facing layoffs, furloughs and cuts in benefits as a result of the city's budget deficit, some officials are saying they can't pay for the costs of police, paramedics, barricades and other services along a 2-1/2-mile-long parade route that could held as early as Wednesday if the Lakers win Game 5 Sunday in Orlando.
In past years, the Lakers held victory parades that attracted upwards of one million attendees each to a route that wound through downtown Los Angeles.
Although no formal announcement has been made, City Councilman Bernard Parks said this year the team plans a longer parade, from Staples Center to the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. A free rally is also being planned for fans inside the 94,000-seat Coliseum.
Police and Lakers officials have already begin discussing crowd control measures, including lining Figueroa Street with cement or metal barriers where it passes car dealers and strip malls between Staples and the Coliseum. Some of those businesses were damaged in the past, when impromptu victory celebrations outside Staples turned into near-riots.
The city has picked up parade crowd control costs in past years, including the "Three-Peat" series of parades that started in 2000. During the 2002 parade, two television news trucks and some city paramedic units were wrecked by Laker fans dancing atop them.
But this year's Laker championship run comes as the city faces a half-billion-dollar budget deficit that is forcing cuts in subsidies for special events and layoffs of city workers.
And employee representatives are speaking out against the pricey parade, estimated to have cost $1.1 million in 2002, according to the newspaper.
"City employees have been asked by their employers to take a massive pay cut," said Barbara Maynard, spokeswoman for the Coalition of L.A. City Unions, representing about 22,000 workers.
However, Parks, head of the City Council's Budget and Finance Committee, says he thinks the city can ultimately cover the cost of a Lakers parade.
"There's going to be a parade," Parks said. "The city should just be prepared for it. The city has an obligation to host these types of events, when you have something that happens periodically, when you have something that is really a kind of monumental event."
(© 2008 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Wire services contributed to this report.)
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