Amador County – Ione City Council last week appointed a “broker of record” to work on getting savings in employee benefits, and discussed ways of cutting benefits as it copes with a General Fund deficit.
The council appointed Keenan & Associates as city “broker of record.” Hal Selby of Keenan & Associates said there will not be big savings to begin with. Selby said “you have an election period to join Cal-PERS, that ended back in August. That starts again in June, so they can talk about that again. He said staff needs to be thoroughly briefed, and he can only assist staff with decisions as they make them.
City Attorney James Maynard said right now they need to look at where they can get savings. City Manager Jeff Butzlaff said they will “try to take one bite at a time and break the ice in our partnership.”
Mayor David Plank said the city has a lot of employees near the retirement age, and should look at leveling out that burden with early retirements to get the loss of employees to a reasonable number.
Resident Jim Nevin said he would like to see short-term savings with a reduction in the number of employees. He said the city has gone 110 days without a budget, and you haven’t made one single cut.” He said city employees get their Social Security paid, though every other employee in the county pays their own. He suggested the council make a “symbolic surrendering” of their $180 meeting stipends.
Resident Larry Rose criticized the mayor for spending $800 on a trip to the League of California Cities conference in San Francisco. Plank said the trip was booked before an auditor found the $500,000 deficit in the General Fund.
Resident Dominic Atlan, who said he has looked into benefits savings for his employees, said the “only thing the city is not overpaying for is dental and vision. He said health, retirement, sick days and holidays are overpaid and he was sick of hearing complaints of small spending, like the mayor’s trip to the conference.
Atlan said city spending on health benefits doubled in 2004, and it pays $105,000 annually on health benefits, or $10,000 a month. He said “there’s $60,000 a month in inflated benefits that nobody’s talking about.” He said “$10,000 a month is way too high for health benefits.”
He said “those are the things we should be shopping around” and worrying about, “not the pennies.”
Story by Jim Reece This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
