City leader wants employee wage cuts

Finally, a member of the Colorado Springs City Council has advocated the most obvious and sensible solution to the city’s 2010 budget crisis. Councilman Tom Gallagher said he plans to push for across-the-board wage cuts for city employees to address the problem of revenues that may fall about $23 million short of what city officials had hoped to spend next year. City officials have spoken routinely of the $23 million budget shortfall, but that amount is deceiving. It includes a pie-in-the-sky proposal for $9 million in recession-era raises that are dead on arrival.

“The public sector is not entitled to a higher standard of living than the private sector,” said Gallagher, who is also pushing for massive reforms to the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, which would allow city revenue to increase more during economic growth cycles.

So here we have a city politician with common sense and guts. The city’s payroll should decrease during times of economic hardship, and it should be able to increase during times of economic growth. It’s a fairly simple and logical concept, really. It isn’t ideological and it isn’t emotional. It is prudent.

Additionally, Gallagher seems to understand the concept of a city government that serves the people who pay for it. While City Manager Penelope Culbreth-Graft opposes wage cuts and furloughs, Gallagher explained it is not her job to craft public policy. It is his job, and the job of other elected officials who answer to those who pay the bills. Unfortunately, city politicians often forget this concept in a government structured around the leadership of high-paid city manager employed by part-time, barely paid elected volunteers.

“It’s not her place to put out there furloughs and pay cuts,” Gallagher said of the city manager. “That’s the job of the elected officials. Sometimes being an elected leader of the community means making unpopular calls.”

That’s true, but how unpopular should this call be? Not very.

As an Aug. 7 Associate Press story explained, “this recession has been the most punishing job destroyer in at least 60 years, slashing a net total of 6.7 million jobs.” Wages have fallen each month since October, declining five percent over the past eight months.

With a national jobless rate of roughly 10 percent, a surplus of good labor is seeking a shortage of good jobs. That means two things: 1. Unemployed and underemployed taxpayers have less to spend on government employee wages; and 2. Government employees are worth less money because they have fewer alternative prospects and more skilled professionals are in line for their jobs. This predicament makes pay cuts nearly inevitable.

City employees know this is true. In a letter to The Gazette’s editorial opinion department, Councilman Bernie Herpin explained the input he received in conversations about possible pay cuts with city employees.

“They say the feeling among many employees is they are willing to take a pay cut if it means keeping their jobs,” Herpin wrote.

Herpin’s letter went on to explain his own recent experience in the professional world, taking a $27,000 pay cut in order to remain employed.

The same day Gallagher’s desire for pay cuts went public, a Gazette news story told of anticipated reductions in Colorado’s minimum wage because of the depressed economy. Every day newspapers throughout the country tell of wage cuts and furloughs that employers hope will save government and private sector jobs.

It seems like an unpopular and absurd decision to hold city employees above the type of pay cuts and furloughs that have challenged the people who pay their wages — especially when faced with a need to lop $14 million from the budget. Elected city officials do not answer to the city manager who is an unelected employee. They answer to the people who pay city wages — the people living on less due to wage cuts and furloughs.

City employees and their families can afford wage cuts no more easily than anyone else. Nobody wants them to suffer the challenges of reduced pay. When the community can afford to raise city wages, it probably should. What is worse than a temporary, recession-era wage cut, however, is a full-fledged layoff into the worst job market in decades. City Council members should join Councilman Gallagher in devising a reasonable combination of across-the-board pay cuts and furloughs in order to bring the 2010 budget in line with the realities of an economy that is producing less wealth, not more.