Court reduction proposed

Wednesday, May 28, 1997 | 10:48 a.m.

The Las Vegas City Council will consider a $500,000 early retirement buyout plan for Municipal Court employees.

The buyout, as proposed by Court Administrator Michael Havermann, is "the final piece" of an efficiency plan that will trim the fat from the city's judicial arm.

Municipal Court officials recently submitted a budget that was 10 percent less than the previous year, which accounted for a 4 percent drop in the city's overall budget.

"This will be financially prudent, not a gift (to those who opt for early retirement)," Havermann told the City Council before it voted unanimously to give the go-ahead for the city staff to crunch the numbers and come back with a final cost.

Mayor Jan Laverty Jones said she wants city positions currently in need of being filled to be offered whenever possible to the workers who are being targeted for early retirement before they are offered a pension buyout.

"As we move through this process of service reductions, it is our fervent wish to do everything possible to avoid layoffs of court employees," Chief Municipal Judge Seymore Brown wrote in a May 19 memo to the council.

"Our strategy ... is to transfer our employees to other city departments and to conduct an early retirement program for the court staff."

In submitting the proposal, Havermann said indications from preliminary findings indicate the buyout figure will "not exceed" a half-million dollars.

The fiscal 1999 savings for the city from the combination of court program reductions, the phasing out of 35 full-time position and from the early retirement buyouts are projected at $2,064,443. The fiscal 1998 savings from the court's cost-cutting measures are estimated at $485,754.

The council recently passed its $239 million budget, which goes into effect July 1. It is $20 million higher than the previous year's budget, but property tax revenues were reduced by 9 percent.

With the property tax reduction, city homeowners will pay $35 less a year on a $140,000 house and $25 less on a $100,000 dwelling.

To cover expenditures that increased by 9.2 percent, the city will receive a 5 percent increase from sales tax revenues plus the money generated by the court savings.

Still, the new budget will allow 54 new positions to be added to the payroll within the next year, increasing the city's staff to 2,134.