The private sector will have an opportunity to bid on city street work, fleet maintenance and more snowplowing under an ongoing effort by the Bach administration to find cheaper ways to deliver government services.

“We will continue to look for outsourcing and efficiencies in our operations,” Helen Migchelbrink, public works director and city engineer, said Tuesday.

“That’s what the taxpayers expect of us. That’s what Mayor Bach expects of me personally, and I’m totally committed to that mission,” she said.

Migchelbrink talked about the city’s increased efforts to outsource during a press conference in which Mayor Steve Bach and his executive team announced another City Hall reorganization that includes six layoffs and the elimination of 13 vacant positions in the streets, planning and finance departments.

The layoffs, reported Monday by The Gazette, include two managers and the city’s traffic engineer, who were each paid $100,000 a year or more.

Chief of Staff Laura Neumann said she declined to comment about the layoffs Monday because they are part of a larger reorganization and what she called “continuous process improvement.”

“None of those decisions were made lightly,” Neumann said. “I’d like to think that we are a very compassionate employer, and we treat our people with dignity. We do recognize that it does impact their life.”

Kyle Campbell, interim planning director, called the people affected by the layoffs “good staff” and said the decision to let them go was “tough.”

When he joined the city, he said he was asked to evaluate policies and procedures for moving projects through various departments and seeing how staffing levels lined up with those services.

“When I got to the end of that particular exercise … it became very evident that there was a definite need to take a look at collapsing some of the middle and upper management levels,” he said.

“While those decisions were difficult, they were needed,” Campbell added.

Neumann said Colorado Springs taxpayers should expect more changes in the future.

“I want to be very forthright,” she said. “This is not going to be the last time we’re standing at this podium talking about process improvements and sometimes that is going to impact certain positions.”

For now, the city plans to outsource paving, chip seal and slurry seal.

“Those are treatments that we use on our road maintenance program. We feel this can be done more effectively by the private sector,” Migchelbrink said.

The city already outsources about 75 percent of its paving work, she said.

The city, which outsourced snowplowing in one of its 16 grids in the northern Briargate area, plans to issue a request for proposals for another grid. That grid is in the northwestern corner of the city, said Rick Rudometkin, streets division manager.

The request for proposals for snowplowing is expected to go out in September, and the request for proposals for the street work is expected to be issued in early 2013.

Migchelbrink said the city is also partnering with Colorado Springs Utilities to look at outsourcing the entire Fleet Division, which handles the maintenance and operation of the bulk of the city’s and the utility’s vehicles.

“That’s a $16 million function that the city pays for,” she said. “We believe we may be able to achieve significant savings of the taxpayer dollar.”

The city also plans to sell five pieces of equipment used for paving and slurry seal, bringing in about $100,000 to the general fund and ending the need to service that equipment, she said.

LAYOFFS

The six city employees who were laid off, with their titles, date of hire and salary:

Michael Maloney, planning assistant, Jan. 13, 1988, $48,728

Denise Tortorice, planner II, July 9, 2001, $70,477

Richard Anderwald, land development review manager, July 16, 2007, $110,333

Brett Veltman, development review enterprise manager, May 7, 1990, $100,302

Robert Stinson, maintenance technician II, Nov. 5, 2001, $41,391

David Krauth, principal traffic engineer, July 2, 2001, $100,302

—Contact Daniel Chacón: 476-1623Twitter @danieljchaconFacebook Daniel Chacon