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By Dave Toplikar (contact) 
Thursday, March 31, 2011 | 1:37 p.m.
Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman is shown in his office at City Hall on Thursday, Feb. 3, 2011.
Mayor Oscar Goodman says Las Vegas city employees deserve cheers — not jeers — for their roles in helping the city through its budget crisis.
Goodman told reporters at his weekly press conference Thursday that some city employees are getting a bad rap when they're out in public.
"It's very unfortunate where they may be out in the supermarket or something and people make a gesture at them just because they're with the city and I think they're confusing us with other entities," Goodman said.
Clark County firefighters have come under criticism recently for findings that some abused their sick leave policy. However, it isn't just Las Vegas city firefighters who are facing public criticism, the mayor said.
"There's just a general comment that public employees are overpaid and aren't doing the right thing, whereas I believe we've really had the process of real cooperation to resolve all those difficult issues," Goodman said.
Goodman invited leaders of the city's four collective bargaining units to join him at the podium during his news conference.
"I thought it was very unfair that our employees in the city of Las Vegas be mottled up with perhaps, other employees in the valley here that have not been as cooperative as ours have as far as our budget quest is concerned," Goodman said.
"I thought it was the appropriate thing to straighten out the record at this time and let the public know how our employees have responded to these very challenging economic times," he said.
Don King, president of the Las Vegas City Employees Association, said his membership made concessions amounting to about $20 million over 2011 and 2012.
"Often public employees are painted with a negative picture, being greedy, being overpaid by the Chamber of Commerce and some of the other agencies," he said.
King said the LVCEA made other concessions that would result in saving the city an additional $5 million a year in the future.
"Times are tough for all of us. I've seen about 125 of my members laid off," he said.
Dean Fletcher, president of the Las Vegas Firefighters Local 1285, said city firefighters also made concessions, with a department budget about $10.5 million less this year than last year.
Mark Chaparian, assistant executive director of the Las Vegas Police Protective Association, said city marshals have taken concessions and were prepared to take more concessions in the future, if necessary.
Tracy Valenzuela, president of the Las Vegas Police Officers Association, said her members gave "unprecedented sacrifices."
"All the unions have facilitated concessions to their labor agreements," she said. "The members stepped up. They took pay cuts, wage freezes, furloughs to assist the city and to reduce personnel costs.
City Manager Betsy Fretwell said that a little more than three years ago, the city staff realized it was facing a $400 million deficit within five years.
"We've cut in the last two or three years well over $100 million in operating expenses," she said. "That's over a 17 percent reduction. And, unfortunately, that has impacted 600 positions or more at the city of Las Vegas."
Those reductions have had an effect on citizens, city employees and the city's service levels, she said.
She said city staff has held 20 public outreach sessions during the last 18 months to help identify cuts the public could live with as the budget was pared back.
Some city functions were privatized, some were eliminated, some staff positions were eliminated, some work hours were reduced and administrative costs were reduced, she said.
She praised the city employees' four bargaining units for negotiating concessions to save jobs and help the city balance its budget.
"At the end of the day, collectively, $36 million over the next two years has been saved," she said. That amounts to between 3.5 percent and 11 percent reductions in city employees' pay on average, Fretwell said.
"People sacrificed to keep our city together and strong financially," she said.
She said the city's management structure was also reorganized so that in the last two years more than 25 percent of management staff was eliminated, which included cutting 28 percent of executive-level employees, she said.
Fretwell said the city is operating at the 2004-2005 funding level, but is still looking at a budget deficit at $10 million to $15 million for the next fiscal year, which begins July 1.
She said she thought more expenses could be reduced without the need for more layoffs next year.
The city council will get a look at the upcoming budget on April 6 and will finalize its budget for the upcoming fiscal year on May 17, she said.
Firefighters are way overpaid.
This guy is amazing. A couple months ago he was publicly bashing the employees, trying to illegally fire them all at once in order to hire a few back at a lower wage. Now he wants to praise them? If I were a city employee I'd tell him to stick his compliments in a gin bottel and guzzle the whole thing. Oscar's training as a mob mouthpiece lawyer really pays off here. If his wife gets elected, we'll still have to put up with him talking out of both sides of his mouth.
big hypocrisy on many levels. city employees should be praised for taking a cut when state employees have already been doing it for years and are essentially just told to "suck it up?"
Just because they might be more likely to vote next week for you-know-who if he says nice things about them.
When who-know-who has to balance a city budget, he can take it all back.
they have no choice.
@William, that's very unfair of you to automatically assume that Carolyn Goodman will be nothing more than a mouthpiece for her husband. It's very insulting indeed. I prefer to believe she is her own person and a whole lot more than a stand-in for Oscar.
As a City of Las Vegas employee I appreciate the Mayor saying what he did. He has always shot from the hip but at least he is man enough to correctly point out the bad rap the employee's have been receiving. The city's new motto should be "Doing more with less". Most if not all departments have less employess, are doing more work then before and for less money. The City of Las Vegas employees stepped up to help before all the other local public employees and have given more. It's easy to bash us as over-paid. Sure when things were good in the valley ALL employees, PUBLIC and the PRIVATE sector reaped good benefits and increases in pay. A lot of jobs were lost in the private sector in town but also by government employees during these difficult times. Keep bashing us, we at the at City of Las Vegas will keep doing our job. Remember when you go to a park and it is clean, your kids are being chased by a pitbull, or you want to enjoy a dip in the municipal pool, the services you receive are staffed by City employee's "DOING MORE WITH LESS". Keep the bashing coming, most people on this bulletin board don't even know where the City of Las Vegas is. Remember "The Strip, McCarron airport, UNLV, Orleans Casino, Boulder Station casino, Boulevard Mall are NOT in Las Vegas. I could go on and on but let the bashing continue. We can take it "DOING MORE WITH LESS"
William, love him, hate him, bottom line is he worked with the Unions and got the job done.
Not many in the county, state or other cities can say that at the moment.
City firefighters are doing more with less. The national average for firefighters is 1.5 ff's for every 1000 people. The city is staffing at .8 ff's per 1000. These figures also do not include the millions of visitors that come and use our services as well. Over the past 20 years the city population has quadrupled while firefighters have only doubled in their ranks. Last year city firefighters about 450 of them, responded to just under 100,000 calls.
Vegasfireman... how many of those calls are legitimate emergency fire calls that involve possible life and limb and how many involve a drunk falling down at the Nugget? For that you usually see an ambulance and at least a fire engine, usually two.
I respect what firefighters do, I appreciate that you're there and willing to do a very tough job, but stop with that kinda crap. Your union has been doing that for years and it's what's contributed to the fiscal mess we're in. Constantly searching for statistics that show we're below the national average and that babies are gonna burn if we don't hire more, pay more and bow down to the firefighters.
By the way I'm a public employee too and it's time to be honest about the services we provide and what the community can afford to pay.
Lol smartone (really?) Legitimate fire calls? First the city of las vegas fd are the 1st responders for fire, EMS, HAZ MAT, bomb, technical rescue and anything else that were to happen here. We don't get to look at the dispatch and decide what calls we are going to go on. Sure we run on drunks and everything else under the sun, but a lot of the times our dispatch will say patient possible 408. (Drunk) but many times, to many to remember the person is not drunk but has a diabetic emergency or has had a stroke. Same with difficulty breathing calls only to find someone in cardiac arrest.
The numbers of calls I was quoting were actual calls not the number of calls that were run by all the various units. The actual numbers would be 30 to 40% more. The city decides what calls we are going to respond to not the union so I have no idea where your comming from there. I doubt you do either.
You said I posted crap... back it up. Let's hear your facts.
For those who think we have too many firefighters and too many units responding I invite you to search out ISO fire insurance ratings. The city of las vegas is a class one fire department. It has been one for about 15-18 years. It was the first in Nevada and I think 7th in the nation at the time. To give you a example, the difference between a class one department and a class 9 department is a average savings of over 65% in reduced insurance cost.
http://www.iso.com/Research-and-Analyses...
explain to me what class 1 department means?
How is the difference betweek class 1 and class 9 determined?
Going to transparentnevada, and selecting just las vegas for a search, and the first thing I see is numerous ff at a cost of over 300k.
There is obviously a problem here as well.
Most if not all earning 300k are chiefs with overtime and most of the highest earners listed are one time employees retiring and selling back there unused vacations. The rest is overtime. The City not the union wanted constant staffing which resulted in overtime but also saving 20% of hiring additional personal. In the past the city just shut down units, but because of our ratings could not do that anymore and keep our iso class one. It was either hire more or pay overtime.
Transparent nevada does not give a true picture of the actual pay. For example some guys have more than 4000 hours of unused sick time. Since that is a bennifit carried on the books and that time has not been used where it has not actually cost the city any money transparent nevada still adds it in as part of our salery. From what I understand those amounts are carried year to year tn just takes raw numbers and just tosses them up without doing a true audit.
As far as explaining a class one rating I posted a link. Read it for yourself.
Seems I missed that story. No media coverage when City employees took a 25% PAY CUT? So then they'd only be somewhat overpaid compared to national averages and GROSSLY OVERPAID compared to local economy.
The city employees had no choice but to take a cut in pay. But everyone should take heed - once you give it up it isn't coming back. That is the reason collective bargaining is more important now than it has been in the last 50 years.
Transparentnevada = False numbers, Nobody adds in total benefits to make it look like these people are taking home these salaries. Many of these added in costs are mandated figures that cities are mandated to pay, ie workmans comp,taxes,retirment,ect... Lets look at W-2's those are the real numbers.
Transparentnevada is just another las Vegas Chamber funded web-site to attempt union abolishing.
I hate to see Oscar go, he gets things done, I don't know if there are any under the table deals but he get things done. I will give the city employees credit for making the deals in order to keep jobs. I just don't know why unions members will not deal when it comes to jobs. If everyone would give a little, jobs could be saved.
HL9000.. the costs without benefits are too high to begin with.....but yes we do need to consider those numbers because it is costing the taxpayers money.
Vegas..I looked at the post and it doesn't say anything about the difference between class 1 and class 9....are you a typical public servant that is too lazy to answer a question and don't even post the info you point to?
Maybe vegas has a good rating because there are not alot of fires.