Facing a $28 million budget shortfall for the fiscal year 2012, Tampa finance director Sonya Little laid out three different scenarios of how the budget could be brought down to size, and those would include major layoffs, including for the first time since the economic downturn in Tampa, police and firefighters losing their jobs.
Though the city has laid off hundreds of workers over the years, the damage has been limited by the fact that many of the jobs cut were lost by attrition, but that wouldn't be the case moving forward. Under the worst-case scenario presented by Sonya Little, the city's finance director, a 15 percent total budget cut would eliminate 729 total positions — with just 63 of them currently vacant, including 200 from Fire Rescue, 194 from police and 165 from parks.
This article appears in Jun 9-15, 2011.