Any fan of the movie Office Space is familiar with the classic line spoken by the boss: “Did you see the memo about this?”
I think the Mayor, Bernard Parks and Eric Garcetti did. It was written by CAO Miguel Santana and it was not about TPS report cover sheets.
You can see it as well right here.
http://phinvv.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/09-0600-s159_rpt_cao_2-9-10.pdf
In a nutshell, it’s about raiding the reserve fund to plug the deficit:
Even with the adoption of the measures outlined here, which includes the depletion of the Reserve Fund, significant work remains to be done to address the remaining deficit of $281.8 million in 2010-11.
The $281.8M is after an extensive series of cuts, including the proposed layoffs of 1,000 civilian employees employees, as well as laying off probationary police officers. Without those cuts, the projected deficit for next year will be $484 million.
What does $281.8 million translate to? Santana provides the answer:
This deficit equates to the full-year salaries plus pension contribution costs of 3,665 civilian employees. Delays in implementing any savings measures will only cause this deficit to grow.
That’s about $77,000 per employee, which gives you some idea of the compensation package offered by the city and why we need concessions from the unions to fix the deficit.
Paul Hatfield
Suzanne Lauer
[...] Village to Village, February 10, 2010 by Paul Hatfield [...]
This is scary info Paul. I can’t believe that even though the politicians knew about this financial crisis they continued to hire employees. Someone stated in a meeting the Mayor actually has hired 5 Deputy Mayors making over $125,000 per. WE need to get those numbers of all the Deputy Mayors like Jay Carson who was hired less then 6 months ago even though the city was already in this tailspin.