April 6, 2006

By Robert Mihalek

Village Council on Monday put in place a new policy that outlines how the Village can reduce staff, if necessary, including through natural attrition, early retirement and layoffs.

Adoption of the policy is seen as a necessary step for the Village to reduce its workforce because of budget pressures the government is facing.

Village Manager Eric Swansen also said the policy was needed because the Village did not have in place guidelines for laying off or reducing staff for financial reasons.

Council approved the staff-reduction policy at the same meeting, April 3, at which it adopted the 2006 budget, which includes deficit spending in four of the Village’s main funds.

The deficits — which are caused by expenditures, including capital items, surpassing revenue — include $368,348 in the general fund, $362,108 in electric, $92,196 in sewer and $145,291 in water. (An article on the budget will be published next week.)

Swansen plans to try to reduce costs by offering early retirement to Village employees “across the staff,” he said. Jobs and responsibilities could be combined as staff members retire, and positions could not be refilled.

During Council’s meeting, Swansen said that staff reductions would be focused on overhead, or, as he described it, the “people who help me do my job.”

He expressed concern for eliminating positions that are involved in maintaining the Village’s infrastructure, which he called the Village’s “largest physical asset.”

He said he has asked staffers who are within five years of retirement “to talk to me.”

“I hope maybe we’ll get through this rough patch and never have to do it again,” he said of reducing the Village staff.

Council voted 4–1 to approve an emergency ordinance adopting the policy and adding it to the Village personnel policy manual. Council members Kathryn Chase, president Jocelyn Hardman, Bruce Rickenbach and Karen Wintrow voted for the ordinance; Council member Judith Hempfling voted against it.

As an emergency, the ordinance needed to be read only one time at a Council meeting, with a public hearing, instead of the normal two readings over two meetings with a hearing, which is required for ordinances that are not declared emergencies.

The policy describes five means by which the Village manager can reduce the workforce. The five methods, in the order that Swansen said he would pursue them, are natural attrition, voluntary resignation, voluntary or early retirements, position elimination, including combining duties, and, lastly, layoffs, or involuntarily terminating workers.

The policy also states that staff cuts would be made “on principles of merit and fitness,” and when two employees are deemed equal in merit and fitness, seniority will be the determining factor.

It also requires that Council approve severance packages the manager would offer to employees.

Swansen said the process outlined in the new policy is based on what the state and its political subdivisions use. “It seems to me the most balanced way to do it,” he said.

The meeting included a lengthy debate on the policy that keyed on two points: the criteria for eliminating jobs and whether the ordinance needed to be approved as an emergency.

Hempfling said she could not support an ordinance that puts into one person’s hands the responsibility to determine which employees are laid off. She said she wanted Council to be part of the job-reduction process.

She also objected to using merit as a criteria for layoffs, arguing that basing job cuts on seniority is the “fairest” approach and that the merit standard is subjective.

Hardman said that eliminating jobs only by seniority “severs our succession” and would “leave us with no junior staff.”

She also expressed discomfort with Hempfling’s assertion that Council get involved in determining who the Village hires and fires.

“Council should be considering policy and allow the staff that we’ve hired to implement that policy,” she said.

The Village Charter said that the manager has the power to “to appoint and remove all subordinate officers and employees of the Village, all such actions to be upon merit and fitness alone” and “to exercise control over all departments created by the Council.”

Swansen said Village employees have been involved in discussions about the budget and possible job cuts and early retirements.

The only Village employee to comment on the policy was Deborah Benning, who as the clerk of Council is an employee of Council and would not be affected by the new policy.

But Benning said that staffers are being forced to delay decisions about their futures because the Village did not have a policy about workforce reductions. Noting that some employees want to retire early, Benning said, “people really want to get started now and not having a policy is preventing them from doing it.”

Swansen backed up this position when he said that he wanted to “add certainty to employees” by getting the workforce-reduction policy in place in a timely manner. “I don’t want to draw this on longer than necessary,” he said.

Villager Stan Bernstein objected to basing layoffs on merit, saying that the “humanity in the village says” the government should consider seniority status when making cuts.

Carol Gasho said with seniority comes a “sense of entitlement,” instead of motivating employees to work “for what they need to do.”

Hempfling and several villagers in the audience disputed that Council needed to pass the ordinance as an emergency. Hempfling said adopting the ordinance as an emergency “reduces the democratic process” and the normal public process needed to approve an ordinance.

Noting that she has been through staff reductions three times in her working life, local resident Sue Abendroth said that her experience has taught her that the sooner employees know how layoffs could occur, the better.

Hempfling attempted to change the ordinance, making a motion that would have removed from the measure the merit-and-fitness requirement for layoffs and the guidelines in the policy that allow the manager to eliminate positions or lay off workers.

The move died when no other Council member issued a “second.”

Contact: rmihalek@ysnews.com