City still looking to downsize

By Zsombor Peter
Staff Writer

GALLUP — Salary increases did little to change the rankings of City Hall's top earners in 2005.

City Manager Eric Honeyfield topped the list once again, according to the city's latest figures, earning a $100,000 salary in 2005. Likewise, Assistant City Manager Larry Binkley and City Attorney George Kozeliski follow Honeyfield, earning just shy of $85,000 each.

The only new addition to the group is Gallup Police Chief Sylvester Stanley, who earned $77,000 in 2005, up from $68,000 in 2003.

Public Works Director Stan Henderson's $74,000 rounded out the city's top five salaries.

All told, the base salaries of the city's 476 employees in 2005 rang in at $13,163,702.

Sure, that's a lot of money, but what exactly does it mean?

Any city's goal, said Honeyfield, is to keep its personnel expenses between two-thirds and three-quarters of its total annual budget. More than three-quarters, and the city is spending too much. Less than two-thirds, and the city is doing exceptionally well assuming city services stay up to par.

Honeyfield said City Hall was still doing the math for 2005.

In the meantime, there are other ways to tell how well a city is managing the size of its staff.

Compared with other cities its size, Honeyfield concedes that Gallup appears overstaffed. But those other cities, he counters, do not swell with visitors quite like Gallup, especially on weekends.

A better comparison, the city manager contends, is among those cities with similar general fund budgets and the particular departments those funds tend to cover. Fed largely by local retail, he said, general funds are a better gauge of how much pressures gets placed on a city's public services. By that measure, the City of Gallup's staff fare much better.

Honeyfield attributes that to the current administration's goal of cutting the city's total staff by 15 percent within two years. After speeding to a 10 percent cut within its first year, however, things have slowed down.

More than two-and-a-half years after Mayor Bob Rosebrough took office, Honeyfield said, "we're still hovering around 10 (percent)."

"The difficulty is we're trying to do it all by attrition," he said, by waiting for someone to leave a job on his or her own, then not hiring anyone to fill it.

Honeyfield still sees room for downsizing, first by consolidating the support staff of City Hall's many department, second by running one seniors center instead of two like most cities Gallup's size. Although both options are doable and would quickly pay for themselves, he said, the initial investment to do either stand in the way.

"If we could build one new centrally located seniors center, we could just about pay for it with the reduction in staff," the city manager said.

And as demands and technologies change, so have the opportunities for consolidating City Hall staff.

Given the likelihood of another tight city budget, however, Honeyfield did not expect the City Council to make room for either project in the coming year. Neither will it succeed in reducing the city's total staff by 15 percent, he added, until it does.