The City of Atlanta is facing a $140 million budget deficit, and is cutting Atlanta jobs to cope.
The city recently laid off 24 employees, and previously fired 372 workers and eliminated 1,116 positions, some of which were vacant. According to an article by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, most of the job cuts took place in the finance department.
Among those to lose their jobs were senior accountants, a budget and policy manager, a treasurer, a financial forecaster and several others lost their jobs. It is estimated that nearly half of the jobs cut were office support staff. Some of the positions to be eliminated altogether were for accountants, a senior financial manager and a revenue auditor.
Although many jobs were eliminated, the city is focusing on protecting public safety positions, and basing layoffs on job seniority and overall performance. The City Council recently agreed to cut the finance department’s funding from $15.4 million to $11.3 million, a difference of $4.1 million.
“The job cuts in the Finance Department followed a series of embarrassing errors city officials made leading up to the deficit,” the article notes. “They admitted to a long-standing practice of ‘under budgeting’ fuel, utility and legal costs. They pointed to sloppy bookkeeping and nearly $5 million in invoices that were more than 90 days past due.”
Following the Atlanta job cuts, the city now has 4,772 employees, or 847 employees per 100,000 residents. This places Atlanta as having fewer employees than St. Louis, Cleveland, Seattle and Kansas City.
Atlanta’s public works department lost the most jobs when 120 employees were laid off, and a total of 225 positions were eliminated. This could affect the number of workers available to conduct routine safety checks and other necessary precautions throughout the city. The police department saw a loss of 192 positions, including 69 for school traffic safety monitors that were transferred to the school system, and 17 police investigator positions.
“That is going to severely affect our abilities to really concentrate and really spend a lot of quality effort and time in solving some of the cases these investigators get,” Sgt. Scott Kreher, president of the Atlanta police union, said in the article. “The call volume and the report volume are getting so tremendous. There is so much pressure put on these guys on a weekly basis.”
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