City union employees flooded the Takoma Park public hearing Monday night to protest the layoffs and wage freeze proposed in the city manager’s draft of the 2011 budget.

About 30 union employees, mostly from the city’s public works department, quickly took control of the podium at the Takoma Park City Council meeting following council comments. It was the first public hearing on the proposed budget, which includes unilateral pay freezes for all city employees and cuts or reductions in hours for 10 staff positions. City library specialist Dave Burbank gave the council its first glimpse of the impact of the budget by introducing library shelver Deborah Erwin, the wife of a city police officer and a mother of three whose position would be cut under the proposed budget to save $12,000, he said.

“At least you’ve gotten to be able to put a face on what to you might seem like ‘Oh this is a hard thing that has to be done,’ but this is a matter of just putting food [on the plate for her] happy, wonderful kids,” he said.

Burbank pointed out alternatives to cutting union positions, citing the payments made by union positions to the city’s family health care plan, a contribution not made by management-level staff.

“If management positions did contribute to the cost of family health care, then positions like Debbie’s or the two union positions that were cut to half-hours, that shortfall could actually be made up right there,” he said.

Rawle Cort spoke on behalf of the public works department’s union workers, many of whom received praise for their hard work clearing city streets during February’s back-to-back snowstorms, but will not receive market wage increases this year in the proposed budget. Ward 1 City Councilman Josh Wright even rode along with Cort for a few hours during part of the storm.

“This would be one of the years that I would have thought that the city of Takoma Park would say, ‘Well, for the job that you guys do for us, we’ll take care of you,’ but it seems like it’s the opposite,” he said. “The market adjustment, we depend on that. … We have families just like you guys.”

The testimony seemed to energize council members for the following budget discussion as they jumped to make suggestions on where to trim expenses or save money during reviews of the general government fund and other areas, including the city’s communications department.

Wright joined Ward 5 Councilman Reuben Snipper in asking City Manager Barbara Burns Matthews to consider taking into account the city’s tendency to underestimate its end-of-the-year revenue. From reviewing past budget documents, Wright noted the city has consistently undershot its revenue estimate by more than $1 million.

“When you look at the end-of-the-year balance, we’re raising $2.6 million higher than we anticipated [in fiscal 2010],” he said. “At the end of the day, basically what we’re doing is holding residents’ money.”

Councilwoman Colleen Clay (Ward 2) also made a number of suggestions, including trimming the city’s issuance of cell phones to employees and, in relation to the city’s non-departmental funds, encouraging the city’s Independence Day Committee to begin generating its own revenue like many of the other city festivals and events, including the annual Folk Festival.

Some of the suggestions made by union employees received immediate attention from the council, with Wright questioning Matthews on the different ways union employees are affected by the proposed budget compared to management-level employees. Matthews assured Wright that, while management positions do not contribute toward family health care, the pay freeze will be universal.

“It will be across the board,” she said of the freeze. “Myself included.”

Matthews agreed to report back to the council on how making management employees pay toward the health care plan would affect the budget, but declined to comment at the public meeting in response to Councilman Dan Robinson’s question about whether lower-salary employees are affected differently by the budget compared to higher, management-level staff.

“This is a matter of labor negotiations and I don’t believe it’s appropriate to be discussing those matters in public,” she said. “If the council would like to have the opportunity to discuss some of these issues, given that we are in union negotiations, I suggest that the mayor schedule a closed session.”

The council also discussed the possibility of cutting back hours for city buildings that will be reviewed in later work sessions. Next week’s budget work session will focus on a review of the city’s police department.