Los Angeles City Controller Kenneth Mejia released a new report this week revealing that $80.4 million is sitting idle across 177 special city funds, some of which have not seen a single dollar spent in more than a decade.
The report, released April 8, analyzed special funds as of June 30, 2025, and identifies accounts with no expenditure activity for at least two years. It is the Controller’s first such report since 2023, when his office identified $73 million sitting unused. The delay in issuing an updated report was due to budget cuts and staffing shortages.
The findings land at a particularly uncomfortable moment for City Hall. Los Angeles is heading into another difficult budget season, with the General Fund facing significant shortfalls. Meanwhile, tens of millions of dollars have been accumulating interest in accounts that nobody appears to be spending.
“We need to put these underutilized funds to work for the people of Los Angeles especially since the City is facing another tough budget year,” Controller Mejia said.
The largest pots of money are earmarked for community safety ($11.9 million), economic development ($10.9 million), parks ($9.7 million), and arts, culture and tourism ($9.5 million). Another $7.8 million is designated for housing and homelessness programs.
Perhaps the most striking detail in the report is how little progress has been made since the last review. Of the 203 idle funds flagged in 2023, 128 of them, or 63 percent, are still idle today. That money has actually grown by $2.5 million since then, purely from accumulated interest, to a total of $41.8 million. In other words, the City identified the problem two and a half years ago and the problem got bigger.
The department holding the most idle funds is the Mayor’s Office, which administers 44 of the 177 flagged accounts totaling $5.9 million. Many of those are old federal and state grants from previous administrations, some with no recorded spending since before 2011. The City Administrative Officer holds fewer funds but more money, with eight accounts totaling $21.4 million, including a nearly $9 million account tied to the former Staples Center that went idle just last year after a long-running debt agreement was paid off.
The report also highlights the Bureau of Engineering, which is sitting on $9.4 million, most of it in debt-related bond construction funds that the Controller says the City Administrative Officer has recommended for loan write-off.
Mayor Karen Bass expressed support for the effort. “We can’t leave any funds on the table as we work to address longstanding City Hall inefficiencies,” she said, citing the City’s ongoing work to reduce homelessness, lower crime and clean streets.
The Controller’s short-term recommendations ask the Mayor and Council to direct departments to develop spending plans for these accounts, repay any Reserve Fund loans owed from idle fund balances, and begin the formal legal process to transfer dormant funds back into the City’s Reserve Fund. The longer-term recommendations include creating sunset clauses for new special funds and developing a policy to automatically clear out old encumbrances after three years.
The full 35-page report lists every idle fund by name, department, cash balance and last recorded expenditure. It is available at bit.ly/idlefunds.