The Daily Newarker

City Hall announced that it will eliminate 295 positions — about a third of which are currently vacant, according to a press release published Monday:

“We are continuing to move forward with our plan to balance this budget on time and in a way that provides the least amount of pain for residents and avoids a tax increase for 2008,” said Mayor Booker. “While we are looking at additional ways to close the remaining budget gap, we have begun to separate municipal employees from the city.”

The move saves the city $12.5 million. Another $4.4 million will be saved by eliminating 95 vacant personnel positions, and the 203 employees who accepted a voluntary buyout earlier this summer saved the City $13 million. One-time revenue streams from the Port Authority ($40 million) and state aid ($45 million), as well recurring revenue in the forms of $20 million in special taxes and $20 million in reduced expenses (i.e. overtime and health care savings) have all helped the city work to close a $180 million gap. However, the City is still short approximately $15.1 million. The Administration is exploring various ways to reduce costs by coming up with ways to generate savings and do more with less.

The state now has 30 days to approve the City’s plan, reject it, or ask for modifications. Vulnerable employees will be notified next month with layoffs planned for mid-November. The Administration has avoided reducing the number of positions that directly impact city services such as sanitation and recreation. All civilian titles and administrative jobs are impacted, including those in the Office of the Mayor and Business Administrator. The Administration will not guarantee that city services will not be affected by this reduction.

The ??Star Ledger?? is also covering the story, noting that we still have a $20 million budget gap to close before the start of the next fiscal year: “Newark layoffs to hit 200 workers”:http://www.nj.com/starledger/stories/index.ssf?/base/news-4/1188102482101960.xml&coll=1.. It will be interesting to see what other tactics City Hall employs to cover this gap — one hopes that it will be a major announcement about a commercial retailer before the end of the year.

Combining the layoffs and eliminated positions with the 203 employees who accepted a voluntary buyout, at a savings of $12.8 million for the city, Newark will save a total of about $30 million. That’s still $20 million short of the $50 million in savings Kemp says is needed to close the budget gap.

Kemp said his staff will comb the 2007 budget with the hopes of cutting an additional $20 million in the fourth quarter of this year.

“Instead of laying off an additional 200 people we will look toward operations to insure we lay off the minimum number of people,” said Kemp. This puts us in a position where we will have to find the savings elsewhere. In short, we are going to have to spend less money on anything that doesn’t impact revenues.”

The majority of the 200 people laid off will come from the support and administrative side, Kemp said, as opposed to service providers like sanitation or traffic enforcement.

Rahaman Muhammad, president of Service Employees International Union Local 617, which represents 600 city workers, said the cuts will hurt Newark.

“Whether it’s 1,000 jobs or 200 jobs, the city should find other ways to plug a budget deficit than on the backs of working people,” Muhammad said. “Two hundred unemployed in a city with already high employment is a lot of people.”

Kemp said Newark’s shortfall is the result of a long-standing structural deficit where the city has spent more money than it has brought in. The city has filled that gap for several years by using money from the settlement of a lawsuit against the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to balance the budget. Booker used $115 million from the lawsuit settlement in the $785.4 million 2007 budget, the same amount the city expects to raise in property taxes.