City slashes summer jobs for students

Students looking for work in the city government this summer will have a harder time finding it.

Figures the city withheld from the Citizen until after city council approved its 2014 budget Wednesday show that more than one-third of the jobs the city is cutting — 41 out of 147 — are for summer students. But that’s measured in “full-time equivalents,” a measure that counts one job as one person working full-time for one year. If a standard summer job lasts three to four months and includes full-time hours, the number of actual summer positions that will be gone is somewhere between 120 and 160. If the jobs are only part-time, it’ll be even higher.

The budget leaves 377 full-time equivalent jobs for summer students, the city says, down from a high of 423 two years ago.

The cuts are in nearly every part of the government, though the departments that hire the most students — parks and recreation, and public works — are also seeing the biggest reductions, with 15 full-time-equivalents cut in the parks department (leaving 224) and 12 cut in the publicworks department (leaving 84).

Proportionately, the departments taking the biggest hits are those that hire summer students for higherskilled jobs, often from programs that specifically train people to work in government, such as the urban-planning department and the environmental-services department. The planning department has cut six out of 16 full-time equivalents from its summer hiring in the past two years and the environment department has gone from 20 full-time equivalents to just seven.

Nobody but the students looking for work will notice a difference, said deputy city manager Steve Kanellakos in an email relayed by the city’s communications department. “Through the budget process, all City departments have looked at ways to identify efficiencies within their budgets,” he wrote. “All of the recommended FTE reductions, including the summer student positions, will not have an impact on service delivery to residents.”