County Offers Laid-Off Workers Welfare Jobs : Budget: Librarians and museum curators may get some of the 500 positions created as eligibility workers and fraud investigators.

A quarter of the more than 2,000 county employees facing layoffs won a reprieve Tuesday when the Board of Supervisors created 500 positions for them in the welfare department.

Librarians, museum curators and other employees scheduled to lose their positions in the wake of the county’s worst fiscal crisis may instead apply for jobs as eligibility workers and fraud investigators in the Department of Public Social Services. The transfers will reduce a staffing shortage in the welfare department, which received funding this fiscal year for only 9,000 of the 12,000 employees it requested.

The bulk of the cost will be borne by the state and federal governments, which fund most welfare programs.

“It’s very smart--it saves people’s jobs and improves county services,” said Gil Cedillo, general manager of Local 660 of the Service Employees International Union, which represents 40,000 of the county’s 85,000 employees.

The jobs are only guaranteed to last through June, the end of the fiscal year. And some employees may have to take a pay cut and demotion to qualify.

Of the 70 librarians and librarian assistants laid off Friday , “some might be willing to make the change,” said Pat Libby, a union representative for the Library Department. “But I’m not sure if a librarian with a master’s degree would want to take a pay cut” of about $5,000 annually.

The transfer program will cost the county the same amount as it would have spent in severance pay for the layoffs, according to Ray Garcia, a spokesman for the welfare department. It will cost the county about $900,000, only about 5% of the estimated $17.3 million they will be paid annually in their new jobs.

The county’s share of the salaries will come from the $1,685 in severance pay each participating worker will be asked to sacrifice.

The supervisors, who voted unanimously in favor of the program, asked the staff to report in two weeks on the legality of requiring the transferred workers to give up part of their severance pay.