Massive county layoffs likely/Press Enterprise/NCTimes
January 13th, 2010http://www.pe.com/localnews/politics/stories/PE_News_Local_W_supes13.4302d11.html
http://www.nctimes.com/news/local/swcounty/article_4120a5d4-2923-5c15-8790-f26272d3a9c3.html
FYI
“County officials Tuesday agreed to offer 78 Riverside County Superior Court employees an early retirement incentive to trim court costs and prevent layoffs.”
“The additional two years of pension credit is a significant expense that erodes savings from such early retirements….when supervisory employees leave, the savings is often less than advertised because someone beneath them must be selected to lead….and the country has to bump up their pay to reflect the increased responsibility. While I dislike layoffs, they save more than do early retirements offers. And eventually, a larger number of employees have to be let go.”
Bob Buster, Riverside County Supervisor
Blog:
Buster understands the issue. With the county budget having a $21 mil deficit…and 18,000 full-time employees on the payroll, the reasonable correction is layoffs and LESS spending.
Growing government makes NO sense when revenues from private sector are drastically down. We can live with LESS government workers and their gold plated retirements.
All government agencies need to cut payroll expense….across the board, layoffs and/or hiring freezes. These costs/benefits are unsustainable. The goose is dying.
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Growing government is a double-whammy-negative, in that you have direct costs associated with payroll, benefits, and overhead, but also citizenry who become accustomed to relying on government services. When government has to lay off workers and/or take services away, citizens have trouble figuring out what to do.
I’m curious as to what a “Gold Plated” retirement would be defined as; I think some people would be surprised to see how low these retirement disbursements can be.
If you use Classified Employees as an example and examine some of the past few years of traditional negotiations, pay increases and health and welfare have been placed to the side at times to maintain the ability to retire with dignity. The reality that isn’t being mentioned here is that even with these “Gold Plated” retirement disbursements there is a significant population that still retires below the poverty level if they are only using their defined pension plan. Hardly “Gold Plated”.
Now, I obviously cannot speak about other employee groups or pension plans but as we reference our specific situation with Classified we’ve had to actively make concessions to maintain the status-quo with our retirement.