City Payroll Larger Despite 6 Hiring Freezes : Budget crisis: Many jobs have been exempted. Number of employees has risen by about 1,190 in 11 months.

Despite a series of six hiring freezes, hundreds of new employees have been added to the Los Angeles city payroll in the past year, lifting the city work force to record levels.

The freezes were designed to cut the city’s annual $1.4-billion annual payroll to combat a projected $120-million budget deficit. Officials hoped to trim 1,600 employees through attrition and save $65 million by the end of fiscal year 1991-92.

But records and interviews show that the number of jobs has risen, in part because the freezes were softened by sweeping exemptions granted by the City Council. Nearly half of the city’s job classifications were exempted from some of the freezes, The Times found.

Just weeks after Mayor Tom Bradley initiated the first hiring freeze on April 1, 1990, he proposed adding more than 1,400 new positions to the 1990-91 budget, and the council approved them.

As five variations of the freeze followed, the council authorized an additional 251 new positions, bringing the total to an all-time high of 34,496 authorized positions, city records show.

In addition to authorizing new positions, the city continued to hire employees to fill many jobs.

In the 11 months since the first freeze, the actual number of city employees has risen by about 1,190, said Carolyn Cooper, an analyst with the City Administrative Office.

In the first half of the current fiscal year, the number of jobs actually filled rose by 244 positions, to 32,350, according to a report by the city administrative officer.

Despite the increases, city Administrative Officer Keith Comrie said Los Angeles is poised to see a dramatic reduction in its work force.

“The figures are deceptive,” said Comrie. “The freeze is for real. The departments, including this one, are bleeding.” Comrie said the freeze has been slow to materialize because many jobs “were in the pipeline” and the city was unable to withdraw job offers and commitments to prospective employees.

The number of city employees peaked in December at 32,350 and has dropped by 139, according to figures supplied by Comrie’s office. “We’ll start to see a dramatic decline, by 100 to 200 a month,” Comrie predicted.

Bradley press secretary Bill Chandler said: “Believe me, city departments are feeling the pinch of this hiring freeze. In the mayor’s office alone, five positions are being held vacant, including the position of deputy mayor.”

Chandler said it is suspected that most of the employment increase in the past year occurred in areas that are exempt under the freeze, such as jobs funded through federal grants or city bonds.

Councilman Ernani Bernardi said, “I think it’s a fraud. We ought to quit kidding the public. . . . It’s not a shortage of money, but a shortage of a commitment to priorities and hard-nosed management.”

Said Zev Yaroslavsky, chairman of the council’s Budget and Finance Committee, “We didn’t have a real freeze until January. It was a phony freeze. . . . The mayor and council were not willing to start telling department heads that we were in a crisis mode.”

Another problem, Yaroslavsky said, is that the freeze guidelines changed too frequently and there were too many exemptions.

One job freeze adopted by the council lasted just 17 days before being replaced by an entirely different program. The new program allowed department officials to fill vacant positions as long as they found other ways to reduce their budgets by 6%.

In the seven weeks between Oct. 31 and Dec. 18, four different sets of rules for hiring were in force, records show.

As of Dec. 18, no one could be hired in most departments without City Council approval.

The council has freed 278 other jobs from the freeze, amounting to 88% of the departmental requests for waivers, according to Comrie.

On Tuesday, Yaroslavsky’s committee approved dozens of jobs, including a clerk typist for the Banning Museum, a police custodian, locker room attendants for city pools and an animal collection curator at the zoo.

The council also has granted 14 of 16 requests for “blanket” exemptions of departments or job classifications that affect 12,500 positions.

The Police Department, the Fire Department and several other city departments--representing roughly a third of the work force--are exempted, Comrie said.

Among the positions exempted were nurses assigned to police stations, proctors for personnel examinations, child care workers in the Recreation and Parks Department and street crossing guards.

Pending before the council are hundreds of other exemption requests--some involving jobs in the mayor’s office and on council staffs.

Assistant City Administrative Officer Stephen Wong estimated that 1,200 employees will leave city service between January and June, and that 590 of those jobs could be eliminated for a savings of $10 million. An additional 1,000 jobs are projected to be eliminated next fiscal year, for a cumulative savings of $65 million.

Officials said they do not know how much money, if any, has been saved to date.

The freeze has not affected the city’s semiautonomous agencies, including the Department of Water and Power, Harbor Department and Department of Airports. These agencies have their own revenue sources and are not financed through the city general fund.