The seven Council shirkers were Vice Mayor Robert Garcia and Councilmembers Suja Lowenthal, Patrick O'Donnell, Dee Andrews, James Johnson, Al Austin and Steven Neal. Councilwoman Gerrie Schipske was the only Councilmember to vote "no" on cancelling the meeting and urged her colleagues to conduct the public's business on Aug. 20. Schipske noted that to date, the Council hasn't even heard a single budget presentation from any City Hall department, including LB's police, fire, parks or library departments.

This marks a publicly contemptuous new low for the current Council majority. Garcia, whom Foster named to chair the Public Safety Committee, has (again) obligingly failed to hold a single hearing of his Committee on the impacts of the Foster-proposed budget on public safety and has already proclaimed it "responsible" (see below what some of those impacts are.)

Mayor Foster's written agenda item didn't even bother to say why he wanted the Council to cancel its Aug. 20 meeting. At the Aug. 13 meeting, he implied that he was proposing to cancel the meeting to suit some Councilmembers who wanted time in August for vacations and family, but he didn't name a single one. When LBREPORT.com telephoned Council offices last week to see who'd be here or out of town, eight of nine offices told us their Councilmembers planned to be present on Aug. 20.

It's pretty clear what Mayor Foster really wanted the Council to do: leave as little time as possible to make changes to the budget the Mayor proposed. Canceling the Aug. 20 Council meeting means the next regularly scheduled Council meeting won't happen until Sept. 3 (although city management is now scrambling to try to arrange a special meeting for Aug. 27.)

Yes, the Council's Budget Oversight Committee will hold meetings, but they can involve as few as two or at most three Councilmembers; the Committee, chosen by Mayor Foster, consists of his frequent allies DeLong, O'Donnell and Lowenthal. The Budget Oversight Committee doesn't control Council budget actions; its votes are advisory on the rest of the Council. The Committee's meetings under chair DeLong are often useful in prying loose details of spending items but the Committee simply doesn't decide what a Council majority can do.

Yes, there are so called Council district budget meetings staged in every Council district but they basically present what the Mayor and management have already publicly proposed. Yes, at those meetings the public may speak, but they'll be barking at the moon: there's NO opportunity for anyone to actually do anything, like make changes to what the Mayor/Manager propose. THAT can only happen at full Council meetings, one of which the seven shirkers have just voted to eliminate.

Yes, the Mayor can call a special meeting -- if he feels like it -- but why would he, when he DOESN'T want any Council opportunities to make changes to what he's proposed?

Yes, Mayor Foster has produced a budget surplus on paper but that's not hard to do when one fails to provide sufficient public safety services for taxpayers. The Foster proposed budget offers:

• NO plan to begin restoring police levels he promised voters eight years ago that he'd increase and instead decimated;
• NO plan to fully fund LBPD's field gang unit that the Council adopted budget slashed in half last year;
• NO plan to provide LBFD paramedic staffing at the level every other city in LA and OC delivers; and
• NO plan to fund and provide taxpayers with the ShotSpotter gunfire location system used in multiple other cities.

Councilwoman Schipske was the only Councilmember who sought to do the public's work on August 20. For this, she received a predictable ration of reflexive bullying from the soon-to-be-former Mayor. But the Council's job isn't to please the Mayor; it's to provide services that taxpayers deserve and the Mayor's proposed budget fails to provide.

In contrast, the seven Council shirkers -- including two Mayoral candidates (Garcia and Lowenthal) and two Assembly candidates (O'Donnell and Neal) -- showed by their actions how little they really think of one of their most important elected duties: to decide how the public's money is spent.

Some politicians assume the public's memory is short, that by the time 2014 campaigns get rolling, things they did in August 2013 will be forgotten. For our part, LBREPORT.com pledges to put what the seven Council shirkers did on Aug. 13, 2013 in our "amnesia file" where it won't be forgotten in 2014 or beyond.

The seven shirkers may hope for teflon. They have earned velcro. You can begin the process by sharing this editorial with your friends on Facebook and Twitter.