By: Diane Benjamin
At last Monday’s meeting Mayor Tari Renner mentioned for the thousandth time the City of Bloomington is down 100 employees. He claims they are doing more with fewer employees.
He never mentions that possibly Bloomington at one time had too many employees and couldn’t afford them!
I compiled the below from what the City submits to the Comptroller. The Comptroller does not fact check this, but the report should come from the audited financial statements.
2005 is just where I started, I could have gone back further.
See 2005 – 2016 here: (This site will take A LOT of clicking!)
See 2017 – 2019 here:
I compiled the table from the data submitted by Bloomington. Each year has a page with the number of employees and Appropriation. I did not include any data under Appropriation for the library, zoo, etc. The number strictly says: City of Bloomington. I do not know where these numbers came from and I’m not going to take the time to figure it out.
It looks like the real truth is in 2007 and 2008 Bloomington had too many employees.
The data from the year ending 4/30/20 won’t be available for many months. Why is the Appropriation really high for 2006? The Coliseum opened. 2020 should be much higher than 2019.
Tari needs to quit saying Bloomington is down 100 employees. The truth is they couldn’t afford 690 full time employees years ago. Now they can’t afford more because spending is going up much faster than inflation. It looks like they keep trying though.
There are several considerations to be taken into account. As a result of the Great Recession, the City couldn’t afford the cost of all of the employees. I believe a short term bond was issued to pay for the cost of the by-outs. Secondly, the way the City calculated the number of employees changed sometime after 2014. which of course changes the reporting. There are 730 W-2s sent out which include part-time and seasonal.
Hales forgot to tell the council of around $4 million those employees got to leave, if I remember right. The comptroller lists full and part time employees. Those numbers are just the full time, as they reported
HECK! Even on good ole “Tari speaks” WGLT this am, he spews out that IN HOUSE legal is cheaper then contracting it out, and blames Hales, saying he liked out sourcing things. SO, who’s the BS’er and WHO’S full of BS?? Tari knows ONLY ONE truth-HE IS ALMIGHTY!! Snap-snap…
In house is cheaper
Cheaper for the city: yes. It would be interesting the total cost of pension, benefits, etc. will be for all state taxpayers. Since they were not prior city employees, their pensions and other retirement benefits (ex. spiking) are less than if they started years ago. Ultimately, it is likely to be cheaper, but we’ll still be paying the pensions for potentially 30+ years after they retire.
How much was Greenberg making whe he was employed as the last city lawyer, $130K?
Sounds about right