DENVER -- Gov. Bill Ritter promised a hiring freeze last year to help bridge the budget gap, but a CALL7 investigation found that as many as 2,300 employees were hired during the “freeze.”

“We have taken a number of steps to shore up our fiscal house: imposing a hiring freeze, stopping several new construction projects and halting non-essential spending requests,” Ritter said in his January 2009 State of the State speech.

But a CALL7 investigation found that the number of state employees increased during Ritter’s hiring freeze, and Ritter’s top staff, who were tasked with managing the freeze, did not know how many people were hired.

“So, during the hiring freeze, the number of employees actually went up?” asked CALL7 Investigator John Ferrugia.

“Yes,” said Jim Carpenter, Ritter’s chief of staff.

Carpenter, in an interview with 7NEWS, repeatedly said about 600 employees were hired during the freeze, which ran between Oct. 1, 2008 and June 30, 2009.

“I think the number is around 600 that we added that in that time period, and a lot of those were replacement positions,” Carpenter said.

CALL7 investigators then told Carpenter about a database from the Department of Personnel and Administration that showed more than 2,300 people were hired during the freeze time period.

“That is a number that is unfamiliar to me, frankly, because I don’t think it was that high,” Carpenter said.

Days later, Ritter staffers said there were actually 1,454 people hired during the freeze but they could not explain why the personnel database shows more than 2,000 hires. They later said the 1,454 number wasn't accurate either.

State Sen. Al White, a Hayden Republican who is on both the Senate Appropriations and the Joint Budget Committee, said the hiring freeze was not properly managed.

“Had we managed this better and had we had better savings in our personnel dollars, we may not have had to make some of the more dire cuts that we have had to look at so far,” White said.

Ritter is now looking to lay off nearly 300 employees and announced four additional furlough days in this fiscal year -- for a total of eight -- to help fill the budget gap. Those are days that state employees won't be able to provide services to taxpayers.

There are about 25,000 state employees who fall under departments controlled by the governor. The analysis of the DPA hiring database shows that in the three months before the hire, the state hired about 1,300 people and in the last three months of the freeze the state hired about 1,100 employees.

Hiring slowed substantially after the ban was imposed but by the end of the ban period it ramped up. For example, the most people hired in a month in the three months before the ban was 515 people in August 2008 but in May of 2009 -- during the ban -- 527 people were hired, according to the DPA database.

During the hiring freeze the average monthly rate of hire substantially decreased from the three months before the hire, but there were still hundreds more state employees after the freeze than before it.

Also, during the hiring freeze, Carpenter required any departments that needed to hire staff receive a waiver from him and budget officials.

CALL7 investigators reviewed all the waivers for the freeze period, finding Carpenter approved fewer than 500 waivers.

Ritter spokesman Evan Dreyer said the additional people who did not receive waivers may have fallen under one of the exemptions to the waiver process that included federally funded positions or interdepartmental transfers. But Dreyer could not provide proof that was the case.

“That’s no freeze to me,” Ferrugia said to Carpenter. “How can it be a freeze to state government?”

Carpenter said: "I can tell you that in an organization as large as state government, you can’t have a 100-percent freeze.”

But White said Carpenter should have made one hire that might have reduced the state payroll.

“It sounds easy on its face,” White said. “It blew up to the point that it was probably more of a job than (Carpenter), with all his other duties, could oversee.”

Carpenter said the hires were necessary to provide services to the state and there would have been even more hires without the freeze.

“In a recession, you have an increased demand for services, you have to get to a reasonable balance here of providing services, of replacing people,” Carpenter said. “If we had not instituted that freeze and saved the millions of dollars we did, there would have been more state employees.”

A state audit, conducted in December 2008 just after the hiring freeze started, was critical of the Ritter administration for not being able to track the budget savings and overall impact attributed to the freeze.