29 city of Spokane employees said Friday they could be laid off

Twenty-nine Spokane city employees learned today that their jobs could be eliminated if the city’s finances are not significantly improved in the coming months.

Mayor Lisa Brown’s administration has signaled for months that layoffs could be coming as the city struggles with its budget and that employees who might be affected would be given advance notice.

While some progress has been made to reduce the deficit the city faces as it prepares budgets for the next two years, it wasn’t enough to prevent 29 city employees from learning today that they may not have a job in January.

If all 29 layoffs go through, the city projects it could save up to $3.4 million, city Chief Financial Officer Matt Boston wrote in a text Friday.

That’s no guarantee those employees will lose their jobs, nor that more could be added to their ranks as financial projections become clearer in the coming months, Brown stressed in an interview Friday. . Negotiations with the city’s unions continue, which could lead to other cost-saving measures as agreed to with Spokane’s police and professional management unions.

At the start of the year, city officials estimated they needed to plug a roughly $50 million hole that will remain in next year’s budget without major changes, including a roughly $25 million hole in the city’s general fund, the bucket of money that pays for, among other things, the city’s police and fire departments.

That shortfall was driven by many factors, such as the city’s costly investment in the Trent Avenue Homeless Shelter, a facility that will be largely decommissioned in October. However, the main driver has been personnel costs, particularly after the latest round of union negotiations resulted in deals that have seen annual compensation increases outpace tax revenue growth.

That “structural gap,” as city officials call it, was temporarily filled by dipping heavily into the city’s depleted savings account and federal COVID-19 relief funds, which run out at the end of the year. Unable to continue drawing from those resources, the city has turned largely to cost-cutting measures this year to balance the existing budget and will ask voters in November to approve a 0.1 percent sales tax increase, so so that funds are available to improve various services, such as reintroducing a neighborhood police resource officer program.

The administration cut about $750,000 worth of unfilled positions, offered early retirement incentives to two of its unions, eliminated the city’s Reproduction Department, which had dwindled from its peak to a single staff member, and renegotiated contracts with suppliers its information technology, for example.

These cost-cutting measures have paid some dividends, as have this year’s conservative budget forecasts. The administration announced earlier this month that it now has closer to a $10.5 million hole to fill in the general fund, with higher-than-forecast tax revenue accounting for about half of that $11 million improvement over the budget outlook initial.