City Hall helping some workers bail out!
To further demonstrate the dire budget situation Carson City City Hall is in, City Supervisors Thursday agreed to set up a program to pay "less important" city workers to quit. Payments include money, on their behalf, to the Public Employees Retirement System to help departing workers with their retirement situation. If PERS isn't an issue, the city can pay them cash or some sort of deferred compensation, or a combination of all of the above.
The money source for all this is from an obscure fund set aside to someday seal up the city landfill off Flint Drive. There is a lot of money in it and as a practical matter, the dump won't be full for perhaps 50 to a hundred years. Some say maybe never. So, they're tapping it for the voluntary worker separation program approved by the Supervisors Thursday.
The program is purely voluntary. Department heads are not even allowed to talk about it with their employees. The agreement is between the worker and the city human resources department. Once the request goes in, the decision whether to honor it lies with the City Manager. While some may be able to take the money and run, others may not if they hold down a position that the City Manager, or after conferring with the worker's department head, decides that the employee should not be given the incentive to leave.
The city was last reported to be somewhere between $8 and $10 million in the red and so top officials using every creative device they can to reduce costs while maintaining a level of services to the public that the city can afford to provide given worsening budget conditions.
Those seeking an incentive to leave their job with the city must agree to walk out the door no later than July 9th.