Buyout Plan Gets 1,500 Workers to Leave DWP : Government: Employees take enticements of $25,000 to $85,000 as utility moves to trim staff by 3,000.

More than 1,500 Department of Water and Power employees are receiving $25,000 to $85,000 each to resign or retire early as the giant city-owned utility seeks to get leaner.

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The buyout package was recently called a “terrific success” by DWP general manager Bill McCarley. “We’re downsizing without strikes, lawsuits or contentious layoffs,” he said.

The DWP plan was to chop 1,000 employees from its payroll this year on the way to meeting a longer-range goal, recommended by an outside consultant, of reducing its work force by nearly 3,000 employees in the next five years.

Streamlining will help the DWP save about $80 million a year and will permit the utility to prepare for a coming era of increased competition and deregulation when it will no longer have a monopoly on supplying electricity in Los Angeles.

The DWP buyout plan is a first at City Hall. But it won’t be the last.

A buyout plan to encourage another 300 city employees outside the DWP to resign or retire is expected to be unveiled this week.

“We’ve never had to do buyouts before because we always have had enough attrition,” said City Administrative Officer Keith Comrie. “But now we need to reduce our work force faster than [by] attrition.”

This latter plan is expected to save $15 million a year, Comrie said.

The wave of departures at the DWP has caused sadness. “We are like one big family over here, and now we are losing a lot of our family members,” said Sandra Tanaka, a department spokeswoman.

Buyout participant Judith Kasner, who has worked 33 years for the DWP, knows how much of a family it is--she even met her husband at the utility.

Taking the buyout “was actually an agonizing decision,” the 55-year-old Kasner said. “I’m thrilled and sad at the same time. DWP is facing some big new challenges in coming years, and I’d like to be here to help meet them. But at the same time, after 33 years, I thought it was time to sit back and smell the roses. I want to spend more time with my family.”

More than 900 of the buyout takers were, like Kasner, people who were eligible for retirement and found that the buyout check was just the incentive they needed to say goodby sooner rather than later.

Others, such as Karen Szabo, a mechanical engineering assistant, were youthful, relatively new DWP employees who could not resist the opportunity to pick up a quick $25,000, the minimum payout, even to the lowliest, most junior employee.

“It feels pretty good--it’s a lot better than getting a pink slip, I’ll say that,” said Szabo, a 25-year-old Hermosa Beach resident with only two years at the DWP. “I’ve got about 50 resumes out, but right now I’m just playing. If I get a job offer, I’ll probably try to go snowboarding in South America before starting work.”

Under the DWP plan, employees were allowed to take whatever was greater: $10,000 and one week’s pay for every year worked or $25,000. A cap of $85,000 was set on how much could be paid to an employee.

The plan is expected to cost $43 million, McCarley said, but will save the utility about $80 million in annual salary, benefits and pension costs. Participants are not eligible to be rehired by the DWP, McCarley added.

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The popularity of the program has caused some minor headaches. It looks as if about 200 to 300 jobs vacated by buyout participants may need to be refilled, the DWP general manager said.

The savings from the work-force reductions will allow the DWP “to try to bring down our industrial rates [to power customers],” McCarley said. These big-business customers provide 70% of the utility’s revenue but compose only 15% of its customers--most of whom are residential users.