Council orders furloughs for city workers next year

Colorado Springs city employees will have to take 10 days of unpaid furloughs next year to help erase a multimillion-dollar budget shortfall, but they won’t have to shoulder across-the-board pay cuts.

The furloughs, which won’t affect police officers, firefighters or other public-safety employees in supporting roles, were among the cost-saving measures approved by the City Council after a marathon six-hour budget session Monday. The furloughs will save about $1.4 million.

“You can look across the state,” Councilman Darryl Glenn said before the decision was made. “We’re the only ones that are not implementing furloughs. It’s the responsible thing to do.”

Among other proposals approved by the council:

• The city will disconnect some streetlights, and it won’t replace some other lights as they burn out, saving about $1.2 million.

• The so-called vendor fee, which allows businesses to retain a certain percentage of the sales taxes they collect, will be eliminated, saving about $1.3 million.

“We’re basically saying that we’re not going to pay the private sector to collect taxes for us,” Mayor Lionel Rivera said after the meeting. “We’re going to keep those (taxes) and use that to provide service to the community. I think that’s the right thing to do.”

The city will place a bigger share of the bed and car taxes in the general fund, which pays for day-to-day operations, and give less to the Convention and Visitors Bureau.

Councilwoman Jan Martin opposed the proposal.

“It’s sort of like cutting off your nose to spite your face when you take money from the Convention and Visitors Bureau and the special events that we are known for nationally and internationally,” she said.

Council members didn’t just implement cost-saving measures.

They restored several public-safety-related expenditures that had been on the chopping block in the 2010 spending plan, including the jobs of 21 cadets in the police academy, averting layoffs in both the police and fire departments.

City officials had proposed layoffs of firefighters, but Fire Chief Steven Cox said the department accumulated enough vacancies through attrition and an early retirement program that layoffs are no longer necessary.

The council also agreed to reinstate two medical squads and a heavy rescue truck in the Fire Department.

Cuts to the Transit Division, which is cutting about 63,000 hours of bus service, were not restored. But the Parks, Recreational and Cultural Services Department got a small reprieve.

The council agreed to keep community centers and other cultural facilities open for three months to give the city time to form partnerships.

“If we don’t fund them fully, let’s fund these things for three months, a quarter of next year, just to buy us the time to go out and find partnerships,” Councilman Sean Paige said.

The proposed pay cuts, which had generated a controversy in Colorado Springs, had only the support of Councilmen Tom Gallagher, who had promoted the idea for months, Paige and Randy Purvis.

“The city employees are not entitled to a better standard of living than the public they serve. Period,” Gallagher said.

But Councilman Scott Hente, who said he had “softened” his position on furloughs after talking to city employees, said pay cuts were off limits for him.

“One position of mine that has not softened at all is the issue of pay cuts,” he said. “I think some (council members will probably) have line in the sand issues about whether we vote for the final budget or not. I’ll be upfront and tell you pay cuts are line in the sand for me.”

Although City Manager Penelope Culbreth-Graft had submitted a balanced budget, the council started the markup session $3 million in the red because of the passage of Issue 300, which phases out enterprise payments to the city.

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Staff writer Perry Swanson contributed to this report.