CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — Corpus Christi City Council had another budget workshop Thursday and the one thing that came out of the meeting is that city employees will not be losing their jobs as part of the cuts.
This year, the city budget sits at $1.8 billion. Around $990 million of that is the operating budget. The rest is part of capital expenditures which right now is inflated due to desal investment.
Thursday's budget workshop focused on the library, code enforcement and parks and rec departments, plus employee compensation and benefits.
City staff has made new recommendations on what cuts to make based on council and community response.
There were talks of the Dr. Clotilde P. Garcia Library and the Oso Wetlands Learning Center being closed, but now it appears they will stay open.
Mayor Paulette Guajardo said she's in talks with one organization to take over the learning center and it's education program.
"Let's talk about the Oso Preserve, I'm speaking with an organization currently who is very interested in taking over that facility and running it, so it would be you know, we get creative, we do a lease," Guajardo said. "We'll see what happens, but those are the conversations being had."
After listening to council and city staff it sounds like the Garcia Library will remain open until the city builds a new southside library to replace it.
Again, these are still all proposals and things could change over the coming weeks.
However, one thing that city leaders are standing behind is their promise that no employee will lose their job. Instead, they will be moved from a job that is being eliminated to one that is open and unfilled.
"So, we would have hired somebody and we still are going to hire somebody it's just somebody from within," City Manager Peter Zanoni said. "So all along that vacancy would have been filled with somebody, so we moved the person over here and this position they were in originally gets deleted or removed and that's where your salary savings come from."
Staff has found cost savings in other places such as reducing overtime pay and defunding positions and a number of positions among the 400 vacant ones the City has right now.
Two of those would be in the form of not filling a vacant assistant city manager position along with the executive assistant. That's savings of somewhere around $350,000 for the year those positions would be left vacant.
Council will vote on the final budget in just over a month at it's Sept. 10 meeting.