Thread: State agencies offer up 9,800 jobs to close budget shortfall

This really irks me! We wouldn't be having these budget shortfalls if we weren't subsidizing illegal immigration!!

To the children at the Texas School for the Deaf, Mary Monckton is a sunny and engaging speech pathologist determined to help them learn to communicate.

But to legislators, Monckton is an expense that Texas might not be able to afford.

Hers is one of 9,800 jobs that state agencies have offered up for elimination as legislators prepare to trim billions of dollars from the 2012-13 state budget, according to an American-Statesman analysis of agency budget requests. Some of those positions are empty, and others will probably be preserved by legislators.

Still, the budget data show that most of those jobs are not vacant, but are filled by living, breathing workers who could be laid off as the state grapples with a projected two-year budget shortfall approaching $21 billion .

Mike Gross , vice president of the Texas State Employees Union , said he expects there will be much more pressure to lay off employees next year than in 2003, the last time Texas faced a similar budget crunch. State leaders have again vowed to close the gap without raising taxes, but the magnitude of the budget problem is greater this time, in part because of the ongoing recession.

"We plan to defeat (layoff plans), but we're going to have a lot more headwind," Gross said. "Texas is not a poor state. We can afford to do better by our people."

Although jobs and the economy have been a major focus of the election season, there has been little if any discussion about the potential loss of thousands of state jobs next year.

Agencies have a tendency to offer worst-case scenarios to open the budget negotiations, said Talmadge Heflin , director of the Center for Fiscal Policy at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a think tank that promotes limited government.

"If they show the legislators all these bad things will happen, maybe it will soften their hearts a little bit or loosen their pocketbooks," said Heflin, a former legislator who was chairman of the House Appropriations Committee in 2003.

Despite the posturing, Heflin said, "there is a bit of truth to what they're presenting."

For Claire Bugen , superintendent of the School for the Deaf, it is agonizing to consider losing Monckton or one of the school's five other speech pathologists along with an audiologist, a librarian, a high school teacher and many other employees.

"Did you see the tears on my page?" Bugen said when asked about her school's $51.5 million budget request.

Bugen, as with other state agency leaders, was required to propose cuts totaling 10 percent of the school's general revenue budget, which came to $3.6 million .

She first nixed a summer school program that serves 250 deaf children from mainstream schools, as well as building repair, some laundry services for residential students, computers, furniture and more. Still $1.2 million short of the reduction target, the only thing left to cut was people.

"Every little position you lose in a school like ours has an impact," said Bugen, who says the School for the Deaf should be exempt from the cuts, as are traditional school districts.

"We're so small. How is our $3,637,402 going to help? It's not going to help the State of Texas balance its budget, but it would do so much for us."

Therein lies the problem for Texas legislators.

What's really on table?

The state's $87 billion general revenue fund pays for a handful of behemoths — public education, health and human services, criminal justice — and a bunch of relatively small agencies.

For now, state leaders have protected public school aid from the cuts, though people from across the political spectrum say it is unlikely that schools will be left untouched.

"If the Legislature is going to balance this budget primarily through budget cuts, nothing can be off the table," said Dale Craymer , president of the Texas Taxpayers and Research Association and onetime budget director for former Gov. Ann Richards.

Lawmakers also have less flexibility to reduce Medicaid-related and Children's Health Insurance Program costs, as they did in 2003, because federal health care reform prohibits changing benefits or eligibility requirements.

The result is a concentrated blow to the programs that are left.

All told, the 10 percent cuts could reduce state spending by $3 billion if fully implemented, according to the Legislative Budget Board.

Another $1.2 billion could be saved if the 5 percent cuts enacted in the current budget are continued.

http://www.statesman.com/news/texas-pol ... s-politics

All they really have to do is make English the OFFICIAL LANGUAGE and get rid of all the ESL classes. I bet that would close the budget gap by ALOT!

ACTION NEEDED HERE

http://www.alipac.us/ftopict-212819.html