JPL to Cut 1,600 Jobs Over 3 Years

As part of NASA’s ongoing effort to dramatically reduce its budget, officials at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena said Sunday that the lab will privatize some operations in a plan to eliminate almost 1,600 jobs over the next three years.

The agency denied employee and news reports that at least 300 workers were given pink slips last week. Lab officials said those staff reductions have occurred over several years, and are due to employees leaving for other jobs, voluntary retirements and some layoffs.

The scientific facility, long at the cutting edge of satellite and deep space research, had indicated two years ago that its operations would be scaled back after the federal budget for space exploration and research was cut.

JPL, the largest employer in the Pasadena area, has a work force of about 6,300 people, including 1,000 contract workers. The vast majority of them are scientists and engineers.

Lab officials want to reduce the agency’s work force to 4,800 by farming out certain administrative and mission control work to private industry. Companies with winning bids would be obligated to hire JPL employees whose jobs are being eliminated by the contract, said JPL Deputy Director Larry Dumas.

“What we’re really proposing to do is not destroy 1,600 jobs,” Dumas said. “We’re trying to take 1,600 jobs and transfer them from JPL to private industry. The work will still exist in the year 2000.”

Firms assuming laboratory work would be expected to pay any agency employee they hire a salary commensurate with JPL’s for one year, Dumas said. If no positions in the private sector are available, then the agency worker will be laid off with a severance package.

According to JPL, the bulk of the cuts will be in administration and ground systems development, which is responsible for mission control, navigation and communication during space flights.

About 1,500 people now work in each area. Over the next three years, Dumas said, a total of 1,400 jobs will be eliminated from both. The other 200 cuts will be from throughout JPL.

The reduction is part of a two-year-old plan to keep JPL’s budget to about $1.1 billion by the year 2000. Nationwide, NASA is planning to eliminate upward of 29,000 government and industry jobs.

Whether the lab will be able to place many of its employees with private firms remains uncertain. Some members of the aerospace community predict that many white-collar workers are going to be hurt.

“JPL is not a very large place. It’s not like you have this huge contractor appendage like Cape Kennedy does,” said John Pike, director of the Space Policy Project at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington. “What they are eventually going to do is fire these people and have private industry hire them at lower pay. How else are they going to save money?”

The announcement of JPL’s plans was greeted with mixed reaction from elected officials in the cities near JPL’s 177-acre site. Some said the drain on the local economy and the school systems would be significant, but others contended that the void would be quickly filled by new residents.

“It’s not a disaster for our city,” said Pasadena City Councilman William Crowfoot. “But it’s a pretty serious disappointment to have people with power and money go off to another part of the country.”

Pasadena officials complained that JPL had not consulted with them about scaling back operations, and Mayor Bill Paparian vowed to urge JPL to give priority to contracting with local private industry.

“We’ll probably adjust to this in time,” Paparian said. “But the real impact on those families [of employees] is one that I hope has been thought through very soberly by the [JPL] leadership. . . . “

Joan Feehan, mayor pro tem of La Canada Flintridge, said the departure of skilled employees will be felt but that she was confident that the area will remain attractive enough to pull in skilled, middle-class families to replace them.

Dumas noted that civic leaders such as Paparian have complained about JPL’s decisions, but he said lab officials wanted to make its plans public to “be as open as we can with our employees and the surrounding community.”

JPL has been synonymous with space exploration, designing and building a host of satellites and unmanned spacecraft, ranging from the Ranger and Surveyor moon missions in the 1960s to the Voyager 2, which captured images of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

Times staff writers Chris Kraul and Nicolas Riccardi contributed to this story.