Georgia budget crisis hits workers’ paychecks

Some agencies are already notifying employees they will have to take a day off without pay each month because of the state’s fiscal crisis.

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Agencies have stopped hiring, frozen pay, scrapped travel plans and nixed equipment purchases.

Those are just the first moves that dozens of state agencies, from the Georgia Bureau of Investigations to the Department of Human Resources, are making to try to meet Gov. Sonny Perdue’s call to slash spending.

State departments have until the beginning of September to send in plans to cut spending at least 6 percent. A few exceptions: Medicaid has to cut 5 percent, and education funding to local schools will drop 2 percent.

In all, Perdue is looking to save about $1.6 billion because tax collections have sagged during the economic slowdown. Collections were off 6.6 percent in July, and Perdue had to use $600 million in reserves to balance the books at the end of fiscal 2008, which closed June 30.

Department of Human Resources Commissioner B.J. Walker already has sent a memo telling employees that, starting in September, they’ll have to take a day off without pay each month. Some key employees in the agency, which has more than 19,000 positions according to the Office of Planning and Budget, will be exempted from the furloughs.

Insurance Commissioner John Oxendine also plans to start furloughs next month.

“The bulk of our agency is in people,” said Oxendine, who will join his employees in forgoing pay once a month. “It is possible we may have to increase it to more than that. It just depends on how the financial situation develops.”

One of the hardest hit areas — and one that faces possible layoffs — may be the state’s university and technical college systems. Combined, the systems employ about 45,000.

The University System Board of Regents is expected to consider budget-cutting plans next week.

The Regents, along with much of state government, have been adding employees at a brisk clip the past few years. Since 2005, the state has added 11,000 positions.

Even as the economy began stalling earlier this year, lawmakers approved a budget for 2008-09 that included new jobs, from payroll clerks, agriculture teachers and elevator inspectors to prison guards, forestry arson investigators and people to answer phones at the state’s customer-service call center.

Sen. Kasim Reed (D-Atlanta), said those new jobs should be reconsidered.

“I don’t know any organization that faces the kind of budget challenges we’re facing that doesn’t take a serious look at right-sizing itself,” Reed said. “We need to drill down and give some thought to whether our government is the right size or not.”

Some schools and agencies are being forced to do that in at least a limited way.

Tom Lewis, vice president for external affairs at Georgia State University, said GSU has already cut out equipment purchases and nonessential travel and hiring.

“I had a [department] director come in yesterday who said, ‘I really need three computers.’ I said, ‘You can’t get them,’ ” Lewis said.

School officials have talked about furloughing employees as well. “We would like to avoid layoffs,” Lewis added.

Michael Light, a spokesman for the technical college system, said officials are considering going to four-day school weeks to save on utility costs. The agency also might eliminate some programs with low enrollment, which probably would lead to layoffs.

“The bottom line is whatever is essential to the education of our students, we’re doing our best not to touch that,” Light said.

The Department of Education, which handles K-12 schools, will likely be responsible for passing along an almost $153 million cut in funding to local school systems. The state Board of Education will formally approve a budget-cutting plan later this month. Among other things, the board is considering reducing funding for dropout prevention coaches and, next year, reducing gift cards given to teachers to help them pay for supplies.

The DNR board will vote on a budget-cutting plan later this month. Everything is under review, spokeswoman Beth Brown said.

In the past, the board has considered closing parks, padlocking swimming pools within parks, cutting funds for water monitoring and raising park fees.

“Whenever you have a budget that is 80 percent personnel services, any significant cut is going to impact some of our service delivery and our ability to operate some of our facilities,” Brown said.

The GBI already has frozen positions, canceled pay increases for agents and eliminated medical examiners’ positions in Summerville and Moultrie. For next year, it will suggest closing down crime lab operations in Columbus and Moultrie.

“We have told the staff that their jobs are being reassigned to Atlanta,” said GBI Director Vernon Keenan. Regional crime labs will remain in Macon, Augusta, Savannah, Cleveland and Summerville.

Keenan said the agency terminated its contract with the company that provided armed security officers at the front desk at GBI headquarters in Decatur. Those slots will be staffed by GBI agents.

“It’s a very bad expenditure of resources, but the alternative is for them to lose their jobs,” Keenan said.

He acknowledged the agents assigned to that post will be upset and said it will take them away from criminal investigations.

The contractors who put criminal history information into a computer system are gone, as is the forensic anthropologist who was used to identify skeletal remains.

At the crime lab, “the backlog’s going to increase. You cannot cut a budget without cutting staff,” Keenan said.

Staff writers Rhonda Cook and Stacy Shelton contributed to this report.