City leaders anticipate money to reinstate jobs, hire
employees
Gilroy – The gloom-and-doom budget predictions of recent years have given way to a sunny local economic forecast, one in which city leaders expect to have enough cash to reinstate jobs, restore programs and hire employees to keep pace with Gilroy’s growth.
In the new fiscal year starting July, the City of Gilroy plans to add seven new employees and hire people for seven positions left vacant as part of financial belt-tightening in the last three years. The hires include four firefighters for the Sunrise Station in northwest Gilroy, transforming the site from a medical response outpost to a fully manned firefighting station.
Officials also plan to restore $26,000 to the city’s Economic Development Corporation and Visitor’s Bureau.
The spending does not represent a one-time thaw in the city’s three-year hiring freeze. In the next four years, officials have budgeted for 18 new positions, more than a third of them to bolster a public works department scrambling to maintain Gilroy’s ever-expanding streets and parks.
City Administrator Jay Baksa estimated the new hires would add nearly $2.5 million to the city’s annual budget of $120 million.
On Monday, he presented city council members with a far different budget picture than he has in recent years, when the state began raiding local tax coffers to finance its debt.
“Since January 2003, the cities in California in general, and the City of Gilroy specifically, have been in a war,” Baksa wrote in this year’s cover page to the five-year budget. “The main ‘enemy’ was the state of California, but there were other nemeses: high retirement and health insurance costs, an uncertain economy, high energy costs. By no means is the war over, but a few major battles have been won.”
The most significant victory, according to Baksa, was approval of state Proposition 1A in 2004.
He said the measure accounted for the return of $796,000 in vehicle license fees and has blocked the state from continuing its yearly tithe of $613,000 in sales tax revenues. Budget plenty has also come from heavy cost-cutting that saved the city $24 million over the last three years, according to Baksa, who said the scores and scores of cuts across city departments gradually added up. The long-term financial outlook also benefited from the negotiation of a cap on the city’s contribution toward skyrocketing health care costs for the vast majority of the Gilroy’s 270 employees.
On the revenue side, the steady stream of millions of dollars in sales tax revenues from the ever-expanding shopping centers along Pacheco Pass have buoyed Gilroy while other cities plunged into debt.
While a series of new shopping centers along the city’s eastern gateway promise even greater revenues, officials hope to continue trimming costs in coming years by convincing the city’s 100 public safety workers to agree to a cap on health care contributions. The city entered into negotiations with the police union last month, and expects to learn the outcome of a year-long labor deadlock with fire union members in June. An outside arbitrator is now reviewing final offers from the city and fire union on a series of contract issues, the most contentious of which has been a costly benefit that would allow firefighters to retire as early as age 50 with 90 percent of pay.
Even with binding arbitration looming in the background, Baksa remained upbeat about the future.
“We’re going from a budget process of enormous uncertainty to a process where we can be much more certain in what we’re doing and projecting,” he said.
While the need for more firefighters and police typically draws the greatest public attention, council members seemed most stunned Monday by the lack of manpower in the city’s operations department.
The department, which has not added a new worker since 1996, has been forced to hire contract labor to help tame city grass, trees and other landscape features.
“To me it’s absurd that it’s been 10 years and we haven’t added anyone in that department,” Mayor Al Pinheiro said at the Monday budget workshop.
Chris Orr, head of the city’s landscape division, presented a detailed plan to bolster the overall operations department by eight people in the next few years.
The budget also calls for two park rangers to beef up safety and cleanliness at the city’s public spaces, now under the jurisdiction of Susan Andrade-Wax, the city’s community services director.
Andrade-Wax took over the department last summer. Though she arrived after the worst of the budget cuts, she showed a keen appreciation for the future as her fellow department heads walked up to the podium and presented their budget requests.
“It’s a good time to be in Gilroy,” she said.
Council members will discuss minor budget revisions and future budget policy at a final public study session May 18. They plan to vote on final approval of the 2006-2007 budget in June.
