Coral Gables Budget: Public Service Department

Do you know what this Department does?  I was never sure.  It has two big jobs–waste collection and landscape services.  Waste collection includes “residential garbage collection twice weekly and trash collection from the street once a week”.  The landscape services cover “landscape maintenance programs for City properties, including street, sawle areas, selected parks, parkways, and parking lots”.  This also includes forestry management.

Public Service staff have been reduced from 40 to 29 in 2008-2009 and 2009-2010 and from 29 to an estimated 24 in 2009-2010 to 2010-2011.  In two years the number of staff have been reduced 40%  for mainly the lowest paid staff.  Salaries and benefits are being reduced by 28% in two years and services contracted from outside of the Department increased by 24% in the two years.

Hence the total budget of the Public Service Department declined a modest 14% in two years, but much more than the overall city operating budget that declined just 6% over a two year period.