After three months of intense strategizing over how to cope with lean and shrinking revenues in a recession environment, City Manager Mark Scott will tell the City Council at tonight’s 7 o’clock meeting that it is time to shed some of the family members at City Hall.
Paring the City Hall staff, relatively painlessly, is the first of seven steps Mr. Scott will present to the Council while simultaneously annoucning that he expects to end the fiscal year on June 30 with a smaller-than-projected deficit.
He predicts the gap will be $2.5 million instead of $3.6 million.
Eschewing the painful traditional policy of layoffs, Culver City’s approach will be more passive: attrition.
Mr. Scott hopes the combination of not replacing certain departing employees while luring a select few others into early retirement with attractive packages will sufficiently reduce personnel expenses.
Since the range of City Hall’s responsibilities will not narrow, the surviving staffers — according to Mr. Scott’s outline — will have to increase their loads and work harder.
Here is the City Manager’s plan, roughly in his words:
1. Reducing the overall size of city operations. With 81 percent of the General Fund expenditures personnel-related, we have to look at the staff costs. We recommend that we focus first, but not exclusively, on overhead functions rather than point-of-service activity.
2. Reducing future personnel by using a combination of position reductions — first, by attrition and affordable retirement incentives — tiering of compensation programs for future employees, and reducing cost exposure for active employees.
3. Reorganizing remain staff resources to adjust to lower staffing levels.
4. Aggressively seeking operating efficiencies and perhaps new service delivery models.
5. Conisdering new revenue opportunities, recognizing that residents and businesses already share the challenges of the economic downturn.
6. Adopting a more aggressive grants and funding effort.
7. Conducting more explicit strategic financial planning with the City Council so that long-term needs and riorities are fully recognizied in year-to-year spending decisions.
