Inglewood to Cut ‘Dozens’ of Jobs During Budget Crunch : Government: City manager tells employees ‘there isn’t any alternative’ in tough times. Number of workers to be laid off has not been decided.

The city of Inglewood is notifying employees that because of worsening budget conditions there will be “dozens” of layoffs July 1, the start of the new fiscal year.

Termination notices have not been mailed, but City Manager Paul D. Eckles on Tuesday sent a letter to all city workers that said: “There isn’t any alternative; we need a dramatic decrease in staffing.”

The number of layoffs will not be known until the budget, which Eckles and his staff are still preparing, is approved by the City Council next month. The council can accept or reject Eckles’ spending recommendations as long as it can balance the budget as required by state law.

Eckles said he must cut $4 million to $5 million from the city’s approximately $51-million wage and benefit account to balance the 1993-94 budget. A good portion of the savings, Eckles said, will come through attrition and an early retirement program.

However, that still leaves a deficit of about $1 million that must be closed by eliminating “dozens” of jobs, Eckles and his staff said.

The cutbacks are expected to affect almost every department, Eckles said, including fire and police. But he added that any layoffs, attrition or early retirements in those public safety departments would be limited to management ranks.

Eckles’ letter follows an unsuccessful city effort to avoid layoffs by persuading its employee groups to delay a contractual 3% pay raise due to take effect in July. The idea was accepted by some unions but rejected by others. Under the terms of the offer, all bargaining groups had to agree for the delay to take effect.

Lost wages were to be repaid to employees after he city received revenues from the proposed card club at Hollywood Park Race Track. The club, approved by voters in November, is slated to open in January. City officials hope to see as much as $10 million a year in new revenues once the club is operating.

Eckles said in his letter to employees, however, that even the delay in pay raises would not have solved what is a worsening fiscal situation.

“As time has gone on and we’ve gotten better and better figures,” Eckles said in an interview this week, “it’s become more clear to us that even with a successful card club we really need to scale this organization down.”

The city has about 850 full-time employees and another 350 who are part time. For well over a decade, however, local governments have been scaling back in the face of new economic realities. Inglewood’s Fire Department, for example, had about 15 more firefighters in 1976 than it has today, although the city’s population was smaller then, Eckles said.

Eckles said this year’s budget crunch is the worst he has seen; even worse, he said, than the one that followed the passage of Proposition 13, the tax-limit initiative adopted by the state’s voters in 1978.

Councilman Daniel K. Tabor said he believes that layoffs possibly can be avoided by a furlough program under which employees would work four-day weeks. But Assistant City Manager Norman Y. Cravens was not optimistic about the plan.

If employee groups were not willing to delay their 3% pay raises, he said, it is doubtful that they would accept a four-day workweek, which would reduce weekly paychecks by 20%.