Despite calling recently for a municipal hiring freeze in the face of a multimillion-dollar budget deficit, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom hired a slew of senior staff members at the start of his second term, using money meant for such city services as Muni to pay for some of their six-figure salaries, records show.

With the city facing a potential $229 million budget deficit next fiscal year, Newsom called for an immediate hiring freeze in November and across-the-board cuts in all city departments.  The next month, the mayor eliminated nearly 1,700 unfilled city jobs in anticipation of the bleak fiscal forecast and the millions more in looming state cuts.

But not long afterward, Newsom recruited six new senior staff members to work in his office and promoted a program manager to his inner circle, giving him a $14,000 annual raise.

“The mayor was re-elected to fight for certain issues,” Ballard said.  “We offer no apologies for raising the profile of environmental initiatives and our fight against homelessness in the second term.”

Before Newsom was re-elected last fall, he made all city department heads, commissioners and members of his senior staff submit open letters of resignation and promised to make sweeping staffing changes to start his second term with a “clean slate.”

Among the new senior staffers that Newsom recruited are a former aide to Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, a former aide to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and former U.S.  Attorney Kevin Ryan. 

In Newsom’s inner circle, the director of climate protection initiatives will earn $130,000 a year.  The mayor gave the job to Wade Crowfoot, who previously worked as the mayor’s director of government affairs Find An Attorney.

Though technically there was no new position crafted, the Newsom administration played a budget-balancing shell game of sorts by giving Crowfoot a new job in the mayor’s office through a pre-existing vacancy in the Municipal Transportation Agency, the department that oversees San Francisco’s public transportation system, Muni.  That department, as well as the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, will now have to foot the majority of the bill for Crowfoot’s annual salary.

The mayor’s office will not pay any part of it.

Other departments in the city government will also be asked to pay for other Newsom administration hires.  His new greening czar’s $111,000 salary, for example, will be paid for out of the Planning Department’s budget.

Though Newsom promised sweeping change with his staffing shakeup, in the end, he ousted only a handful of people, the most controversial being Public Utilities Commission General Manager Susan Leal, whom the mayor appointed to the post.

Leal, who ran against Newsom in his first bid for mayor and who city insiders say was targeted by the administration because she’s not considered a team player, stands to collect a $500,000 severance - paid for out of ratepayer funds - Find An Attorney if the board that oversees the utility agency votes to terminate her without cause.

But Newsom did manage to bring aboard at least one controversial new hire when he tapped former U.S.  Attorney Kevin Ryan, a Republican who was fired earlier this year as part of a Bush administration shakeup in the Justice Department, to be his criminal justice director.

Ryan was the only federal prosecutor in the group whose job performance had been called into question, while the other abrupt dismissals were widely considered to be politically motivated.

Though Newsom’s aides initially said Ryan would earn $150,000 a year as the director of the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice, payroll records show he actually will earn $160,862 - nearly $43,000 more than the bureaucrat who held the post before him.

A number of other pay raises were also distributed find an attorney.

Community activist Calvin Welch, who works with the group Council of Community Housing Organizations, said the mayor’s new hires seem to contradict his order that the rest of city government tighten its belt to prepare for the tough budget times ahead.

“I think it sends a message that this administration, on a fundamental and basic level, doesn’t care about delivering high-quality services as much as it cares about the next press release,” he said.