THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN CORRECTED AND CLARIFIED REGARDING THE NEW FINANCE DIRECTOR'S RATE OF PAY.
CLEARLAKE – Less than a week after the Clearlake City Council voted to lay off several employees – among them police officers – the layoff notices began to go out.
The council took the unanimous vote near the end of a nearly three-hour-long meeting May 13, following a second discussion in as many meetings on the city's troubled financial situation and a rather dire set of options set out by administrative staff.
City Administrator Dale Neiman said the employees slated for layoff received their notices this past Wednesday, May 19.
Slated for cut are 9.5 full-time equivalent positions, including 5.5 from the police department, a maintenance worker, office assistant and assistant planner, as Lake County News has reported.
Neiman said the layoffs will take effect on June 1.
Additionally, Neiman's position is going to half-time on July 1, with the council needing to approve an at-will agreement with him, the same as that for the city engineer and finance director, he said.
Neiman said his current agreement has a three-month severance pay provision in the event his position is terminated or eliminated. In the new agreement his position could be eliminated at any time by the council with no severance pay.
Also becoming part-time is the city's finance director post. To fill that job, formerly held by Michael Vivrette – who abruptly resigned in March – the council interviewed two candidates and decided to hire Fort Bragg resident Roy Mitchell, brother of Mark Mitchell, one of the developers of Cristallago. Neiman said he has known Roy Mitchell since the early 1990s.
That decision also was made at the May 13 meeting, when several community members and Councilman Roy Simons suggested a local person should be hired from the job. Neiman and other council members said they had not been able to find a local candidate experienced in government finance.
In the May 13 meeting it was stated that Mitchell would make $525 a week. However, he actually will make $520 a week in subsistence pay and shall receive $66.63 per hour, not to exceed 20 hours per week. He will start work the first week in June; Neiman told Lake County News that he scheduled that start time to save money.
Neiman told the council May 13 that he thought the finance job could be handled part-time, and that the busier times of year would be summer and fall, around budget time. The position will get no retirement of medical insurance.
By voting to accept the cuts Neiman proposed, the council eliminated the city's code enforcement division, which has become more active in recent years. About three years ago the division was processing about 300 cases a year, which over the last two years has grown to about 1,000 cases annually, Neiman said.
Neiman said this past week that Clearlake Police Officer Ryan Peterson, who was doing the field work for code enforcement, was reassigned to patrol starting May 18, and city administrative staff will process paperwork on the code enforcement cases currently in the pipeline.
Cuts to code enforcement alarmed some community members who spoke to the council May 13. But Neiman explained, “We left the easy decisions about two years ago,” adding that in his 30 years in city government he's never seen anything like what is now confronting Clearlake.
With many things hitting the city all at once, “There's nowhere to go,” he said.
Amidst the gloom, there were community members signaling their willingness to step up, roll up their sleeves and help.
Among them are businesswoman Jeri Spittler – who promised the council that she could use “barbed wire and chewing gum if I have to” to get things done – and Pete Gascoigne, a former city employee who volunteered a day a week to work on code enforcement cases.
Spittler is now in the process of organizing a city grassroots redevelopment revitalization project at the corner of Lakeshore and Olympic in Clearlake on Saturday, June 5.
Offers like those of Spittler and Gascoigne caused Mayor Judy Thein to say toward the end of the May 13 meeting, “I've just seen a great spirit tonight, something we haven't seen here in a long time.”
Explanations for what happened
Clearlake has gone through numerous staff cuts in recent years, as Neiman pointed out to the council May 13.
He offered a detailed explanation of a number of financial strains encountered by the city over the last decade, suggesting, “I don't think the prior councils knew exactly what was going on.”
In the 1990s, the city borrowed $654,000 from its redevelopment housing fund to purchase Austin Resort. Such a usage of redevelopment funds is illegal, and the group Clearlake Housing Now sued the city and won. The settlement required the city to pay back the redevelopment housing fund, with additional costs of $400,000 to settle the lawsuit, Neiman said.
Neiman said his predecessor, Kathy Kivley, suggested a 17.5 percent raise for city employees. “The money wasn't there and that's caused a lot of problems,” Neiman said.
In February 2007 Neiman arrived, and the first budget he put together – for the 2007-08 fiscal year – has $4 million in revenues and $5 million in expenditures in the city's general fund.
Since then the city has had to cut a number of positions, and reduced expenditures by $975,000, and they've beem working hard to save money and become more efficient, Neiman said.
Other cost reductions have included having a city attorney present for meetings only on an occasional basis. The city would have spent $525,000 over the last three years for a city attorney to attend all meetings, but they've reduced that to less than $100,000, Neiman said.
They also have saved $115,000 a year on planning consultants and $95,000 to manage the city's housing program by having city staff take over those responsibilities; Neiman took over the Community Development Director job, which saves $143,000 annually.
Just through efficiencies such as those the city has saved another $939,000, Neiman said.
Still, that hasn't stopped deep staff reductions.
Since the 2006-07 budget year, the city has lost 24.5 positions, with current staff now totaling 39 full-time equivalents, Neiman said.
“Everything's been cut out of the budget that we can possibly cut out, and the only thing that's left are people,” he said.
As such, programs like code enforcement – one of the few unmandated programs the city still has – are being eliminated, Neiman said.
The environmental consequences of doing away with code enforcement “are going to be significant,” Neiman said, showing slides of residences filled with trash that had been cleaned up.
In addition to Clearlake's more immediate troubles, the state continues to take money from the city.
Neiman said the state Legislature has adopted bills to withhold gas tax revenues from July 1 through April, which will mean holding back $270,000 from Clearlake. That, Neiman said, will mean the city won't have much of a public works department. He said the city filed an exemption request.
Clearlake also has underfunded employee retirement programs, the state is taking redevelopment money and with income taxes “substantially under” projections, the state is taking more money from local governments to make up the difference, Neiman said.
“Those are some of the big things that we're facing,” he said. “If the state can't generate revenue in the future, I think the future's pretty bleak.”
As well, if the city can't do a better job of providing services, residents will become more dissatisfied, it will become harder to attract qualified city staff or city council candidates, Neiman said.
Neiman said that staff will bring back to the council resolutions on how to do short-term borrowing within city funds to keep city hall going.
Thein, herself a former city finance department staffer, said it was clear that the city couldn't continue the way it was going. She said it was up to city residents to decide what kind of community they wanted.
“We tried to put a project through, the shopping center, and unfortunately that met opposition, and that's the choice for people,” said Thein, referring to the lawsuit filed against the city by the Sierra Club Lake Group over the Lowe's shopping center project proposed for the city's former airport property on Highway 53.
She challenged the community to “put the politics aside” and work together.
Clearlake resident Susanne Scholz applauded the council for making tough choices to keep the city solvent. She also suggested others come forward to try to put negativity behind the city and make it work better.
Estelle Creel told the council they should cut Police Chief Allan McClain's job to half-time, reduce Neiman to half-time and pay him $45,000 a year – about $27,000 less than he would get on his new half-time assignment – lay off other staffers and cut the council's health benefits, which Creel suggested would save $76,000 a year.
Councilman Chuck Leonard said his benefits package is part of his payment for being a council member. “You have no idea the amount of hours I put in,” he said.
He said if Creel was willing to chip in some money to help the city he would consider giving up his benefits.
Another community member, Jim Scholz, suggested, “The reason this city has been such a mess is we've had unqualified people leading it.”
He said he believed Neiman could lead the city through it, noting that the first thing not to do in difficult situations is panic.
“We've got a lot of people in this city that are willing to chip in,” he said.
Supervisor Jeff Smith, himself a Clearlake resident, said he had asked a former city manager in 1999 where redevelopment money was and he wasn't getting answers. Now, he's finding out that that money was being siphoned off.
He suggested the city needed to pull together in order to move forward, adding that redevelopment needed to be extended. “If you don't think we have anything now, we'll have nothing later on” if it isn't extended, he said.
McClain said he wanted people to understand that department heads aren't overspending, and that they've come in under budget for the last three years in a row.
If the city needs him to leave, McClain said he can retire and come back at half-time. The question, he suggested, is can the police department be run with a half-time person.
He said it bothered him to his core when he hears people suggest that he and Neiman don't want to be there. “I guarantee you I wouldn't take the public abuse that I do if I didn't want to be here.”
At the time of his hire in 2007, McClain said he had another job offer, but that he chose to come to Clearlake.
“I made a commitment to this community,” he said, explaining that he promised the council five years of service.
He said many people don't understand that the city's revenues are as bad as they are. “We're at our wits' end.”
Neiman said McClain offered to go half-time. “We need a police chief full time, there's absolutely no question about it,” Neiman said, explaining that the greatest liability the city has is if something goes seriously wrong with the police department.
That led Neiman to cutting his own job position to half-time. He said he expects his workload to drop significantly – much of it has been spent on redevelopment, with the plan soon to be considered for extension. The Lowe's plan, which also is completed, was another project that took a lot of time.
Thein said she sat down with Neiman and McClain, trying to look at the city's problems from different angles, but it boils down to no revenue.
“This is a very hard choice,” she said.
Thein said the Lowe's project had been “a way out of the darkness for us.”
Vice Mayor Joyce Overton said she hated laying off city employees.
She also called the community to action and encouraged them to volunteer to help get through the rough patch.
As to the Lowe's project and the lawsuit, Neiman noted during the meeting that the city's attorney said the city couldn't be in a better position with regards to the suit.
On May 10, Neiman and Sierra Club representatives held a telephone settlement conference, he told Lake County News.
The first task in moving forward is putting together the administrative record on the project, which includes all documents associated with it. He said the Sierra Club agreed to a 30-day extension due to the lack of city staff.
He said the city is asking the Sierra Club for a deposit of between $5,000 and $10,000 to prepare the administrative record.
E-mail Elizabeth Larson at
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