City to freeze wages and hiring

AUSTIN (KXAN) - The City of Austin's human resource department will not be as busy in the coming months. City Manager Marc Ott announced a full hiring freeze, along with wage freezes Friday.

City officials say the hiring freeze will save $2 million, and the wage freeze will save another $1 million. They are still, however, looking for more than $10 to $15 million to cut.

"The last thing that I would want to occur is for us to be all of a sudden confronted with a crisis set of circumstances," said Ott on why he made the decision for the freezes.

Ott said the move in the wake of spiraling sales tax revenue for the city of Austin.  The latest tax figures from November show a decline of 6.7 percent.  For the budget year, Austin is down 4 percent in sales tax revenue.  The city projected a 3 percent revenue growth for this year. 

Still, Ott said sales taxes weren't all part of the problem. "We're not really just concerned about sales tax, you know we have property tax too as a principal source of revenue," he said. "Obviously if you're not paying your mortgage you could be hard pressed to pay your property taxes bill as well. So we're concerned about that."

"I'm all for it," Austin Mayor Pro-Tem Brewster McCracken said. "This is how you handle big downturns," McCracken said. "You start with a hiring freeze, and then the last thing you try to do is any kind of job cuts."

The city already had in place a hiring freeze for many jobs that are funded with general revenue dollars. This freeze would apply to the revenue generating departments as well, including Austin Energy.

Ott also announced wage freezes for and a temporary hiatus to evaluating payscales every three years.  The last time the Cit y of Austin implemented a hiring and wage freeze was for the 2002-2003 fiscal years after the 9/11 attacks.

Ott said he told Council Members late last night about the impending decision.  He also said police, fire, EMS and 911 call takers will not be affected by the hiring freeze for the City of Austin.

Austin Council Member Lee Leffingwell, who announced his candidacty for mayor Friday, said he was glad to hear about the savings for public safety jobs.

When asked how long he thought the other employees would remain on a wage and hiring freeze, Leffingwell said, "How long do you expect the recession to last? If you'll answer that question for me I'll give you the answer."