Countywide : 11 UCI Employees Get Layoff Notices

UC Irvine’s College of Medicine notified 11 administrative employees Wednesday that they would be laid off in 30 to 60 days, university officials said.

It was the first wave of an expected 30 to 50 layoffs in coming months as the university braces for cuts of at least $15 million in state funds to operate the 17,000-student campus, university spokeswoman Linda Granell said.

The 11 who received notices are clerical, supervisory and analytical workers for the medical college, which has a total of 109 administrative employees, Granell said. No faculty members are among those laid off, nor is the action expected to affect the operation of the UCI Medical Center in Orange.

“There is a high priority on the campus for this next fiscal year to protect academic programs,” Granell said.

To save courses, programs, faculty positions and class size, cuts will be proportionally larger in administrative divisions. And layoffs are only a “part of the continuing process in how we deal with these reductions in state funds,” Granell said. “We’re still waiting to see what the final budget reductions will be from the state.”

UCI officials have assumed there will be a $15-million cut in state funds, or nearly 10% of its operating budget of about $180 million. (That represents about a third of the university’s total budget of more than $600 million.)

But university officials say efforts to balance an $11-billion gap in the proposed state budget may ultimately result in further cuts totaling 18% or more to the nine-campus University of California system.

Just how many people will be laid off or what further reductions will be necessary will not be known until agreement is reached on the state budget. University officials had hoped for a state budget later this month. But many say that as the state’s economic health worsens, a final accord may not be reached until August or later.

Over the past year, the university has laid off 40 others in various departments, largely due to cuts in the 1991-92 state budget. No further layoff notices are expected this week.

The impact of Wednesday’s layoff notices was hard to gauge. But Granell said, “It’s very hard emotionally for the people being laid off, as well as for the people they work with.”

She said every effort will be made to assist those employees with career counseling and job searches. They also will be given priority for future jobs on campus.