MONTEREY PARK - Thursday, June 24, 2010 -- After months of struggling with declining tax revenues and negotiating with employee unions,the city of Monterey Park has announced the elimination of 24 positions in the city to be effective July 7, 2010.  Of those, 19 are filled and the incumbents will receive layoff notices, city officials announced on Thursday.

Human Resources Director Bob Blackwood said those positions were "across the board" and that one department would not be hit harder than another.

Interim City Manager Don McIntyre said he was disappointed this had to be done, but added it was the sole option left to the city.

“It is with sincere regret that we take this action, but I am confident that remaining city employees will continue to work collaboratively and minimize any impact to the services and programs provided to our community," McIntyre said. "The reason we have layoffs is the union didn't agree to accept the pay cut and rollback of other benefits, including two negotiatated pay increases over the next two years. Because they didn't agree with us, we had to do layoffs."

McIntyre added those who remain will still get the negotiated pay raises.

"The people in the union have had two different percentage increases totaling under 5 percent," he said. "They will still continue to get those."

And as for the possibility of re-hiring those who have been laid off, McIntyre said, "Not in the forseable future."

Phone calls to union representatives by The Journal Newspapers were not immediately returned.

Earlier this year, the city council authorized the city staff to begin negotiating with city employee unions for a proposed 10 percent reduction in salaries and many reductions in other benefits. If employee unions did not accept the proposal, then layoffs were to be imposed to balance the budget for the upcoming year.

Monterey Park, along with many other cities, has been struck by the recent downturn in the economy along with declining revenues, mostly from the loss of retail sales taxes. In addition, the city has lost funds from its redevelopment agency which city officials said was raided by the state of California.

"As retail sales drop and businesses move out of the area, revenues coming into the city have dramatically dropped," a city press release said.

The release continued, "As a result, the city implemented a hiring freeze, reduced expenditures to those critical and necessary, and approved a two-year service credit option to encourage attrition (early retirements).

"In addition to these actions, the city conducted extensive meet and confer negotiations with represented employee bargaining units in an attempt to negotiate salary concessions in an attempt to forestall laid-offs.  Unfortunately, the employee bargaining units did not agree with these concession."

The city announcement stated that the layoffs are expected to result in a salary and benefit reduction of $1,560,000 with $1,249,000 of that being from the city's general fund.

The  release said the city of Monterey Park prides it self on being a "full service," city with its own library, water department, police and fire departments as well as a recreation and parks department with 14 parks, including two swimming pools and two gyms.

No details were release about what departments would be impacted by the layoffs.

The Journal Newspapers Assistant Editor Shel Segal contributed to this article.