On paper they are just jobs
– duties, tasks and functions performed by faceless individuals
on a daily basis.
But in reality, the 36 city positions that may be cut are
people.
People with families to support, people with bills to pay
– real people who have been working in limbo for the past two
months, with the tremendous uncertainty of what their futures hold
for them.
On paper they are just jobs – duties, tasks and functions performed by faceless individuals on a daily basis.
But in reality, the 36 city positions that may be cut are people.
People with families to support, people with bills to pay – real people who have been working in limbo for the past two months, with the tremendous uncertainty of what their futures hold for them.
The City of Hollister Finance Department is in jeopardy of losing three of its employees – Finance Director Barbara Mulholland, Senior Account Technician Barbara Vance and Account Technician Wendi Reed.
Mulholland, who has been director for more than five years, is responsible for all the revenues and expenditures of the city, the investment of funds, accounting for funds, and a slew of other responsibilities while overseeing her 10-person staff.
Over the past two months, no one has told Mulholland or anyone in her department why their positions may be cut or given them any kind of an operational plan for after the layoffs occur, she said.
“I would guess that at some point we’re going to have to have a plan – as to who my people would report to – those that are left,” Mulholland said. “How are we supposed to function in this department with half the people? I’ve laid awake for the past two months at night, trying to figure out how you can operate this department that way.”
Vance, who is in jeopardy of losing her job after 13 years of service at the finance department, is a single mother who commutes from her home in Gilroy.
If her position is cut, it will mean less time with her family and more time on the highway, probably commuting to Silicon Valley, she said.
While the waiting game gets harder and harder every day, she still remains hopeful that something can be done to reduce the list of positions being cut, she said.
“Everybody that works down here has been very dedicated,” Vance said. “But you feel a little resentful – that they don’t feel that maybe what we do is important enough to keep us around. But I don’t think they know the full impact.”
For the department, the cuts don’t just affect those who are losing their jobs, but impinges on the entire community.
With less people to manage the same work load, public services will plunge. The department won’t be able to serve the public personally at the counter all day and take phone calls at the same time.
“The public contact is not going to occur. The customer service level is going to go from being able to answer the phone when you call, to where you get a recording and we have to return the call,” Mulholland said. “Hopefully sometime that day, if not the next day. It’s going to have a real impact.”
Because the finance department is in charge of utility services, the time it takes to turn water services on or off could be lengthened, she said.
“We’re going to have to start scheduling turn-ons and turn-offs,” Mulholland said. “People will get it turned on eventually, but it isn’t going to be a one-day turn around.”
The accuracy and timeliness of utility bills could suffer, which means the public could have a shorter time period to pay their bills and their payments could be more or less than they should be, she said.
“We’re going to hit one of those triple switching months when you have payroll, utility billing and payables (to the city’s vendors) that all occur on the same day, and we’re not going to be able to do it,” she said. “It means a lot is not going to get done.”
For situations such as this, the city could contract an outside party to do payroll, but all of the personnel information has to be maintained and the auditing completed, which is much more work than simply pushing a button and printing the checks, she said.
“It doesn’t solve it to out-source that type of a thing,” she said. “It could mean that employees don’t get their paychecks on time, and if you ever want to see a riot, have paychecks not go out on time. People get really ugly about that.”
If the payables to the city’s vendors aren’t paid on time, it could make the city an unattractive customer to prospective vendors when vying for supplies, she said.
“If you have two customers and one piece of equipment that they both want, who are you going to give it to?” Mulholland said. “The one who pays you on time, or the city where you go, ‘well, we’ll get paid one of these days.'”
The list of possible adverse situations goes on and on, and although the department isn’t currently coping with these problems, they are coping with a severe decrease in morale, said Reed, a six-year veteran employee whose position could be cut.
For the single mother of a 4-year-old and a 7-year-old, the situations that could arise after jobs are cut pushes her to work that much harder while she’s still employed, she said.
Leaving extra work for the people left behind to struggle with is not an option.
“They’re going to have a hard enough time as it is,” Reed said. “They’re like family, and you don’t want to stress out your family. As low as morale is, there’s still a spirit of working together, because whether you’re one of the ones who stays or goes, we’re still all in this together.”
Being in the business for many years and only one year away from retirement, Mulholland is more worried about her employee’s futures than her own, she said.
“These people are great, and the city is losing great people,” Mulholland said. “It’s going to be something that’s going to take years and years to recover from.”
If her job is taken, Reed has no plans to uproot her family and leave Hollister. If she can’t find any work in town that can accommodate her family, she will be joining Vance and the thousands of other commuters on the highway, she said.
“The hard reality is that I’ll have less time with my family, and I’ve explained that to them,” Reed said. “Even though they’re small, they ask if we’re going to have to move, and I tell them no, we won’t have to move… but it may mean that mommy’s not here as much as she was before.”
The women realize that their lives and the 33 other city employees’ lives are not the only ones being affected – that the state’s fiscal crisis is causing people to be laid off all over.
But they ask that other options be considered before cutting 22 percent of the city’s workforce.
“I know there are still things that we can do as a city to reduce that number from 36 to something a little bit more reasonable,” Reed said. “That’s what I pray for. I may not be saved, but somebody else might be.”
