Orange : 84 to Be Offered Early Retirement Plan

The city’s interim personnel director this week laid out an 18-month plan to restructure City Hall without layoffs.

Instead, the city will offer an early retirement plan that would cost $2 million if all 84 eligible employees took it.

“When we are finished, the organization will not be destroyed,” Steven V. Pham said of the municipal government in a presentation to City Council on Tuesday.

Pham said he expects 18 to 23 of the city’s 624 workers to accept the offer. Letters explaining the retirement plan will go out next week.

A budget-cutting proposal presented in April that would have laid off or forced the retirement of more than 80 employees stirred up so much protest that the city delayed drafting a financial plan for fiscal 1995-96.

In the past two weeks, finance officials scrambled to pull together a $48.4-million budget that is expected to be approved Tuesday.

By 1996, the plan should be well underway to cut costs in the face of declining revenue, Pham said. Each department will be scrutinized to cut costs, redeploy workers and still maintain the same service level. He would not speculate, however, on how much money the plan would save over time.