Kidney stones will have an easier time being passed than the Jersey City Fiscal Year 2000 budget. In the mile-long march towards approving and finalizing the city’s spending plan, already into its seventh month, the City Council has taken the first steps toward closing the ledger books for the year. On Monday, local labor leaders organized a summit for the unions, the mayor, City Council and state legislators to attend. At that meeting, which state representatives did not show up for, Mayor Bret Schundler continued to defend his position that the state is to blame for Jersey City’s financial handicaps, as state aid has not kept pace with inflation. “We will never be able to fund the city on property taxes alone,” Schundler said. “We shouldn’t have to do this.” “Everything is politics, and that’s a dirty game,” said Robert Wilson, president of the Public Employees Local 245. On Tuesday, the city held a public hearing on the budget, with the last of the municipal department examinations complete. For four weeks, members of the council had grilled individual department supervisors in order to find fat to remove from the bone-dry budget. Many council members have expressed their feeling that they were presented with the mayor’s budget without enough time to adequately study it. Already included in the FY2000 budget is the belief that Trenton is going to write the city a $16 million check in the name of Distressed City aid. The reason for the long process is that the city is suffering from a massive budget gap and has been lobbying the state for aid to fill it. Buyouts debated Ward A Councilman Robert Cavanaugh criticized the budget at the end of the hearing because it includes the aid that may or may not come. “This [budget] isn’t worth the paper it’s written on,” Cavanaugh said. “We’ve got $16 million in here that we don’t know if we’re going to get. This whole thing doesn’t make sense to go ahead with.” Last month, in the face of almost 2,000 layoffs, the city administration offered – as a humane way of decreasing the payroll, they said – salary buyouts to those employees who had volunteered to leave their posts. Included in the buyout were three months’ salary and six additional months of benefits, which have amounted to dizzying numbers. In particular are the $47,806 collected by ex-Chief Financial Officer Nicholas Fargo and the $44,914 taken home by departing Department of Recreation Director Joan Earls. “The buyout, to us, was the lesser of two evils,” said Jack Shaw at Monday’s summit, president of the Campaign and Professional Workers Union Local #1. “What we will not accept is one new hire to replace someone who took a buyout, or a layoff. That includes contracting out services.” The buyouts have come under a great deal of fire this week, as council members questioned the legitimacy and manner in which the buyouts were presented to specific city employees. “Some people may have been forced into the buyout,” Councilman-at-large L. Harvey Smith said at Wednesday’s council meeting. “The waters of this city were muddied by the administration of this city, and I’m talking about the mayor.” At the council meeting, someone claimed that certain city employees who were thought to have been retiring at the end of last year appear on the buyout list. Others believe that certain employees may have been pressured into taking the buyout. With no layoff lists made available by the administration, workers are left guessing if they are marked men or women. Cavanaugh has even called for an investigation of the buyouts, which he said “should not have been offered without the council’s consent.” Labor leaders also question the way in which the buyouts were structured. Traditionally, buyouts are offered to longtime employees who earn above-average salaries. Those employees are then replaced with younger, less experienced workers, which saves the corporation – in this case, the city – money on the payroll. When the buyouts were introduced in December, it was announced that any employee who had been with the city for at least a year would be eligible. In two letters, both dated Jan. 12, the city was informed by the Jersey City Police Superior Officers Association and the Jersey City Police Officers Benevolent Association that the two organizations intend to file federal lawsuits against it. The suits target the refusal by the mayor and the council to extend buyout offers to the police department. “We didn’t create this situation,” Smith said, “but we’re being asked to remedy it.” At the very late conclusion of Wednesday’s council meeting, Council President Thomas DeGise presented a resolution to amend the FY2000 budget. “This is the product of sitting in the budget meetings and finding what we could find to cut,” DeGise said of amendments that would help to cut away an additional $708,000. “This is bone, at this point.” DeGise said that he was able to take small amounts of extra cash from numerous departments. The proposed amendments will be voted on at a special meeting of the municipal council next week. “This is the seventh budget that I’ve worked on,” DeGise said, “and this has been the worst one ever.”