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Increased policing, rubbish collection, sanitation, traffic control and moonwalk monitoring before, during and after this week's Michael Jackson memorial service cost the city of LA $1.4 million, the mayor's office has revealed. Do you think the rubbish bags were gold plated too? Needless to say, the high costs have been criticised by some, who point out the city is already $530 million in debt and could really do without such extra expense. Though, to be honest with you, once you're $530 million in debt, what's another million or so? And prior to the memorial City Councilwoman Jan Perry pointed out that city authority did budget to police and manage large unforeseen events in the city like the memorial. Nevertheless, criticism over the city's expenditure in relation to the event has only grown since Tuesday. Leading the criticism is LA City Attorney Carmen Trutanich who, according to the New York Times, says he will be investigating why the LA authorities agreed to cover so much of the costs relating to the event, given the city's poor finances. A spokesman for the Attorney's office said: "The city attorney does not want something like this happening again, the city paying for a private event. That's especially in a cash-strapped city, where people have been furloughed or even lost jobs". Meanwhile City Controller Wendy Greuel has criticised not the concept of the city footing the policing bill relating to the memorial, but the nature of some of the police's expenses, in particular asking the city's emergency management department why $48,826 was spent driving in sandwiches for police officers from a deli 80 miles away, when a similar number of sandwiches bought from local branches of Subway would have cost just $17,491. Possibly in a bid to silence critics, the LA mayor's office set up a website earlier this week where Jackson's fans could make donations to help cover the city's costs. Though that sort of backfired when too many fans went online to donate and the site crashed, going offline for hours. A spokesman for the major's office issued a statement reading: "After collecting more than $17,000 from hundreds of donors in support of the Michael Jackson Memorial Tuesday morning, the City's Information Technology Agency could not handle the high volume of traffic or adequately respond to frequent and prolonged server crashes. The City apologises for the inconvenience to those who were unable to contribute to the memorial costs. The Information Technology Agency is attempting to rectify the problems". Of course, even if the website does raise a substantial sum of money to help cover the city's expenditure it probably won't silence critics who really want to see the Jackson family cover the costs.