news-record.com

GREENSBORO — Savings from early retirement and layoffs in Guilford County aren’t as large as anticipated, according to the county.

Earlier this year the county cut 73 jobs in two rounds of layoffs and offered early retirement to nearly 200 employees, citing potential savings of more than $16 million.

But with severance packages and updated counts on who would retire early, the savings to the county is now somewhere between $6 million and $10 million, or less than $50 on the property tax bill for the owner of a $200,000 home.

“You never know exactly how many employees are going to take you up on early retirement,” said Steve Arnold, vice chairman of the Board of Commissioners. Arnold said Thursday that he had not yet seen the data.

The updated totals came from a summary requested by Commissioner Paul Gibson at a June 18 meeting.

The News & Record had previously asked for that same information, which is public, but had not received any figures.

Board of Commissioners Chairman Melvin “Skip” Alston said that he felt that the figures weren’t anything new.

“I’ve always given you estimates that we would save this,” Alston said. “It’s not anything that we would try to hide from anybody.”

Though these exact figures were released for the first time this week, Alston said that he believes that spending information should be released to commissioners before the public gets to see the numbers.

“If something happens in the county, I would hope that my staff would call me and let me know what’s going on before they issue a news release about it,” he said.

County Manager Brenda Jones Fox compared tallying the figures to hitting a “moving target,” which contributed to the lag in releasing the figures.

“We had the information, but not in a concise way, and this process has been done over a number of months,” she said.

Gibson has been a vocal opponent of the county layoffs. He also opposed the sudden retirement of former County Manager David McNeill and the resignations of the former deputy manager, Ben Brown, and the former county attorney, Sharron Kurtz.

Alston has said that he let McNeill and Brown know that he had the votes to remove them from their positions or eliminate their jobs.

After McNeill’s resignation, Fox was named interim county manager and presented a budget with no property tax rate increase.

In February and March, Fox made the call on layoffs that cut 39 active employees from the county’s payroll.

This week the county announced that the total paid in severance packages to those employees is $367,405. Each severance amount fluctuates based on an employee’s longevity.

The county also said that $385,385 is expected to be paid in benefits to early retirees.

That figure has been more difficult to pin down, according to Fox, because more than the 102 employees currently expected to retire could leave.

And some of those positions will need to be refilled with less expensive staff.

“If a person retires in a key position where we have a great need, then we will fill it,” Fox said.

Gibson was unavailable for comment late Thursday.

Contact Gerald Witt at 373-7008 or gerald.witt@news-record.com