DeKalb CEO abruptly puts planning layoffs on hold

Dozens of DeKalb County’s construction site inspectors are spending the weekend in career limbo after going to work Friday expecting layoffs then learning the job cuts were being postponed.

Officials had planned to eliminate most of the employees in the Development Department, but in a surprise move county CEO Burrell Ellis intervened.

The collapse of the once-booming development industry has created a financial crisis for the county. There are fewer projects and less work for inspectors. Crucially, the department is also earning less in fees.

The employees knew it. They came to work Friday prepped by their bosses to expect a layoff announcement, but then something unexpected happened.

Ellis held a news conference on the sidewalk outside the development department in downtown Decatur and said he was unhappy with the way the situation had unfolded. There would have to be staff cuts, he said, but he didn’t know how many and he needed time to sort out the options. He postponed a decision until next week.

Ellis doesn’t have much wiggle room.

County commissioner Jeff Rader said Ellis’ right-hand man, Keith Barker, had told him that 90 people in the department of about 110 would have to lose their jobs because of falling revenue.

“This is being driven purely by the numbers,” Rader said.

In a later interview, Barker, the county’s executive assistant, said he did speak with Rader this week about the layoffs but said he didn’t believe he gave him a “hard number of 90.”

Whatever the final tally, it’s likely to be big. The department is funded almost entirely by license and permit fees paid by developers. Officials based this year’s budget on $8.4 million in such revenue when they adopted it in February, even though revenues were falling.

Now, it looks as if the department will collect $4 million less than hoped, said Russell Frankofsky, the county’s budget manager.

“It turned out that the loss of revenue was catastrophic,” he told commissioners at a Friday morning budget retreat that was scheduled to deal with this and other revenue crises. “Half their revenue has just dried up.”

That means workers such as building inspector Lorena Robinson-Saeed may lose their jobs. She said bosses huddled with employees Thursday and told them to turn in their computers, cellphones and other county equipment and to put their belongings in boxes. They’d get word on their job status Friday.

“They said we’ll have a meeting and they’ll tell us who’s going to stay and who’s going to go,” Robinson-Saeed said. “And you’ll be escorted out of the building.”

She said employees had known for months that layoffs were coming because they knew department revenues were down.

Rader said officials failed to respond to economic reality.

“The way that we got into this fix is that we didn’t react soon enough,” he said. “They exhausted this fund by paying people who had been idle for months.”

The director of the department, Patrick Ejike, didn’t return a call for comment.

County finance director Mike Bell explained at the commission retreat that Ejike felt “there was some glimmer of a turnaround — and it didn’t happen.”

Bell, a longtime DeKalb employee, said it was an extraordinary situation, with a “remarkable decline” in construction. “In my adult lifetime,” he said, “I’ve never seen a set of numbers like this.”

Developers and builders are concerned by the looming cuts but they aren’t surprised, said Christopher Burke, vice president of intergovernmental affairs for the Greater Atlanta Home Builders Association. Builders have been slimming their own head counts for two years, he said.

“I think the surprise is that it took so long for the cuts to happen.”