Montclair To Lay Off Eleven Employees In Response To RDA End

The city of Montclair is on the verge of laying off 11 current full time employees, a move brought on by the state of California’s elimination of municipal redevelopment agencies. According to Montclair city manager Edward Starr, the cost to the city of employing personnel wholly or partially devoted to the city’s redevelopment function was $1.3 million. Expenditures from the redevelopment agency were covering $1 million of that cost. Starr has indicated that with the elimination of redevelopment funding, including pass-through money from the state and money generated as a consequence of property tax arrangements to fund programs targeting the elimination of blight within city limits, the city can no longer sustain the positions.
The city has yet to publicly delineate precisely which positions will be cut, pending notification of the employees themselves.
In addition to the 11 yet existing employees, the city will eliminate nine other currently unfilled positions.
The redevelopment agency directly employed four full-time employees whose duties consisted exclusively of work related to redevelopment. It appears they will receive pink notices. Seven other employees from other departments whose work crossed over into redevelopment-related assignments will also lose their jobs. It is unclear whether two employees of the city’s youth center who received layoff notices last week are among the 11 positions to be eliminated or if those represent a different round of layoffs.
Starr, who derived the layoff list in conjunction with the city’s department heads, has not publicly disclosed who is on the list. Sharon Agajanian, Starr’s executive secretary, told the Sentinel that as of Wednesday, the soon-to-be-let-go employees had not yet been informed officially of their fate. The positions are to be eliminated at the end of the fiscal year on June 30.

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