The bookless library stands behind a locked chain-link fence with signs warning of 24-hour video surveillance, one of four libraries the City of San Jose has built but cannot afford to open. The city’s Fire Department laid off 49 firefighters two years ago, and the trucks that race to calls now carry only four firefighters instead of five. Streets are repaved less often. And the Police Department, which laid off 66 officers last summer and has shrunk by about a fifth in recent years, has grounded its helicopter, reassigned officers from special units to patrol and stopped responding to burglar alarms. The nation has lost 668,000 state and local government jobs since the recession hit — more than in any modern downturn, according to a new analysis of labor statistics by the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government. On the national level, the steady loss of public sector jobs has reduced the effects of recent job gains in the private sector and has slowed economic growth. But in cities and states around the country, the loss of those jobs has made it harder to provide services and has upended the lives of thousands of workers who had thought their government jobs were safe. It is not just faded industrial cities that are struggling to retain their workers. San Jose, a growing city of nearly one million in the heart of Silicon Valley that is now the nation’s 10th biggest, has shed 1,592 jobs — more than a fifth of its employees — over the last four years as falling tax revenues, rising pension costs and dwindling state aid have all taken their tolls on the city and its workers. Christine Velasquez, 39, who lost her job at the city’s redevelopment agency last spring as the state prepared to shut it down to save money, now uses local coffee shops as virtual offices for networking and job hunting — including Caffe Frascati, an Italian-style cafe she helped bring to the city when she worked at the agency. John Robertson, 28, who was recruited to the Police Department here from his old job as a New York City police officer with the promise of better pay and better benefits, was laid off last summer. Mr. Robertson, who is getting married this year, said he was lucky to find a job a couple of months later at another Bay Area police department. Teresa Gutierrez, 66, who in June lost her publicly financed job as a translator and an organizer at a center that helps the poor, has not been as lucky. She now takes home some food for herself from the food bank where she has helped out for years. “I can’t find a job,” Ms. Gutierrez said at her old office at the Santee Neighborhood Action Center, where she still volunteers to help people avoid eviction, find help or learn about gang prevention. “There are hardly any jobs anywhere. I even looked in a restaurant, to wash dishes, and they said no, with your application you’re overqualified.” It is hardly the image that comes to mind when many people think of a Silicon Valley city where the median household income is $76,794 a year and employers include Cisco Systems, eBay and Adobe. But the city’s tax collections this year are projected to remain below where they were five years ago — and California law makes it hard for cities to raise taxes, since they must win voter approval first. Pension costs now consume more than a fifth of the city’s general fund budget, officials said, and have risen to $245 million this year from $73 million a decade ago. “You’ve got this double whammy for local government of the retirement costs escalating and the crash of ’08, the recession, knocking revenues down at the same time,” Mayor Chuck Reed, a Democrat, said in an interview in his office in the city’s new 18-story Richard Meier-designed City Hall, which was built in better times by his predecessors. The city government’s employee head count has shrunk to 5,400 from 7,418 a decade ago, when it had fewer residents. Branch libraries are open only four days a week. And the city recently won agreements from its unions to cut compensation for all of its employees by at least 10 percent. Now Mr. Reed is taking aim at pension costs, which rose after the benefits were improved over the last decade, with police officers and firefighters able to retire after 30 years with pensions worth 90 percent of their salaries. He supports a ballot measure this June that would require workers to go into far less lucrative retirement plans, or to contribute up to 25 percent of their salaries to keep their current benefits. “Every dollar the city pays for retirement costs is a dollar we can’t spend on services for our residents,” he said in his annual State of the City speech this month. Union members picketed the speech. They have accused the city of exaggerating the future costs of pensions to build support for the measure. Jim C. Unland, the president of the San Jose Police Officers’ Association, said that the police were willing to negotiate on retirement costs, but that the mayor’s proposals went too far. Yolanda Cruz, a library network engineer and the president of the city’s Municipal Employees’ Federation, pointed out that city workers would not get Social Security, and that the average pension for nonuniformed workers was $36,000 a year. She said a city-commissioned poll had found a growing willingness to raise taxes. For now, the city is trying to figure out how to make do with fewer workers. After the police unit in charge of gang violence was merged last year with a unit that focused on quality-of-life issues, street-level drug dealing and prostitution, a spate of gang-related murders occurred in the city, which remains one of the safest of its size in America. The smaller unit was ordered to focus on gangs. Then there was an increase in prostitution. “It’s no longer ‘Do more with less,’ ” said Christopher M. Moore, the chief of police. “It’s doing less with less, and what is it that we’re going to do that makes the most sense.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: February 18, 2012
An earlier version of this article and a photo caption misspelled Christine Velasquez’s surname as Velazquez and misspelled Caffe Frascati as Caffe Frescati.
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