'HIRING FREEZE' PROMPTS FEELING OF DEJA VU.

Byline: KIMIT MUSTON Local View

I experienced a form of deja vu last Sunday when I picked up my newspaper, only to read Los Angeles City Councilman Dennis Zine quoted as saying, ``Either we have a hard hiring freeze or we don't. From what I've seen, we don't have much of a hiring freeze.''

It sounded familiar yet different, like an echo. It bugged me all week, but at last I figured out where I'd heard this song before.

Back in late 2001, facing bleak economic forecasts and a projected $250 million budget shortfall for 2003, the City Council - at Zine's suggestion - instituted a hiring freeze. The plan was that any workers who quit, retired or were fired would not be replaced until the city's finances had improved. Of course critical positions would be exempted in order to maintain vital services.

At least that was the plan.

By the end of 2002, however, the freeze had suffered a complete meltdown. In the last six months of that year, the Personnel Committee, chaired by Zine, had recommended that some 3,600 positions be exempted from the freeze. And the council had approved every exemption presented to it, usually without debate or review.

Not that it mattered, since you also have to factor in the 3 percent pay raise given to the City Hall unions, which meant city government would have had to cut 3 percent of all personnel just to break even, making an effective hiring freeze largely meaningless.

That's just business as usual at City Hall. They call it a freeze, but it's not even a cool-down. The Personnel Committee was approving and recommending almost 138 positions a week for exemption. That's 28 jobs each and every business day, adding up to more than 10 percent of the total City Hall work force. When the Daily News broke this story in January 2003, I wrote that you could get heat stroke from a freeze like that.

Well, Zine felt the story and my column were misleading. Last February, he wrote his own column for the Daily News in which he defended his committee's actions, and he had his director of media relations e-mail me a copy just to be sure I read it. I did. Here's what the councilman wrote:

``The Personnel Committee has not approved unnecessary, frivolous or luxury positions. Rather, the positions approved were basic quality-of-life positions, such as civilian public-safety jobs, including 911 operators; sanitation trash collectors ... and Department of Transportation officers who ... raise millions of dollars in revenues for the city through citations. ... The total amount of exempted positions adds up to considerably less than 1 percent of the $4 billion L.A. city budget.''

It sounded like a reasonable argument. As the councilman wrote, ``Well-intentioned people can reasonably disagree on which positions and in what numbers have to be eliminated to meet budget constraints.'' That's true. However ...

Mayor James Hahn's new projected budget for 2005 is $5.1 billion, with a shortfall of $300 million. And yet, in June, the City Council quietly shelved the hiring freeze, although circumstances - known elsewhere as reality - forced its reinstatement in October.

In any case, one year after Zine's reasonable ``quality-of-life'' exemptions to the hiring freeze, city government now has 239 more civilian workers than it did before.

We now know that, since the councilman's column was published, the Mayor's Office has grown by 25 positions, the Commission on the Status of Women has added seven, and the 15 members of the L.A. City Council have provided themselves with 73 new staffers. Just whose ``quality of life'' are we talking about? What we need is a Commission on the Status of Women Taxpayers. Unfortunately, we can't afford to staff it.

The new voice of reason on the freeze is Councilman Bernard Parks, head of the Budget and Finance Committee, which also has a voice in exemptions. When asked about last last week's story on the runaway City Hall employment train, he sang a familiar tune. ``These are all for critical jobs ... like police officers, firefighters and sanitation workers.'' So it's deja vu all over again. Same song, just a different member of the chorus.