Study Session - January 10, 2012 - The Important Bits

Today’s study session was… Well, it was. And now it’s over. Thank goodness.

We didn’t learn too much new information, but what we did came out a little muddled. Apparently the math is confusing, and it’s easy to wander off and get lost in the tall grass of the jungle of HR speak and budget details.

Status of Layoffs

Despite some confusion over the difference between an eliminated position and a layoff (if you weren’t there for it, consider yourself lucky), we have a few facts to share:

After exhausting ways to minimize impacts by eliminating vacant positions, and offering early retirements, the city needed to eliminate 62.7 positions, meanwhile 107 positions (largely police and fire) are on hold pending negotiations. To achieve the 62.7 eliminated positions the City ended up with the following equation:

12.1 (early) retirements + 2.5 rescinded eliminated positions + 36.1 “mitigations” (transfers, demotions, reductions of hours etc), + 12 layoffs = 62.7 eliminated positions

That means that while 62.7 positions were eliminated, only 12 employees were actually laid off in this round. Others retired, were shifted to other departments (i.e. non-general fund budgets), or took demotions. As the Mayor reminded us, the bottom line is the impact on the general fund budget, and getting fixated on layoffs versus eliminated positions gets tricky. Um, yes.

The 30 day delay will apply to 96 police and fire + 10.5 other positions = 106.5 positions.

That 30 day clock began ticking on January 6th, when the layoffs would otherwise have been effective. The City and unions are working to minimize cuts to public safety positions, but any cuts that have to be made will be effective by February 6th. In order to meet that deadline, notices would need to go out to affected employees by January 20th, and layoffs would need to be completed by March 31st.

Independent Financial Review

Next up, the budget update.

Now if you were watching along, this is where you really wanted to bash your brains out on the nearest hard surface. Okay, maybe that’s an exaggeration, but it takes a really inspiring speaker to make a budget presentation interesting, and let’s just say that the Hebert rep is… an accountant.

First, it’s important to note that Hebert Research did their work with no assumptions of rate increases, layoffs or policy changes – just the numbers as they exist – leaving it for city to make changes as they see fit. This means that actions taken to mitigate the gap already, and those in the works now are not included.

That said, what we heard was:

“… Methodology: blah blah blah … A population decrease is predicted based on census #s (vs Office of Financial Management #s), so JBLM population impacts were largely not counted. … The gap between revenue and expenditures is quite large going out to 2014, but the gap between the City’s projections and and Hebert’s isn’t. Line items for expenses and revenues [blah blah blah, general Council/accountant confusion, blah blah, statistics jargon, blah blah] with an r squared confidence of 1.4.”

Cutting through the haze, the bottom line is that there don’t appear to be too many surprises at this point … from what we can tell.

The Council raised quite a few valid questions, about population assumptions, among other things, not all of which seemed to get satisfactory answers, and we’re guessing that both of these conversations will take continued clarification, which we’re fairly certain will be at least as riveting as today’s session.

For a bit more information, see our budget post from yesterday: Previously on Exit133