Carcieri: R.I. needs job cuts

Fending off criticism from other government officials, unions and advocacy groups, Gov. Donald L. Carcieri said Thursday that the 1,000-plus job cuts he proposed last week are essential if the state is to pull itself out of the budget crisis it’s been stuck in for years.
The governor’s plan, for which only a broad outline has so far been disclosed, aims to cut state spending by $100 million per year by not filling 487 jobs expected to be vacated through next June, eliminating another 414 jobs through “government re-engineering and redesign,” and letting 115 contract workers go, for a total of 1,016 jobs cut.
In addition, Carcieri wants to save $50 million by renegotiating labor contracts and another $50 million through “government services reform.”
The proposed cuts amount to about 10 percent of the state work force over which Carcieri has direct control. Another 5,492 state employees, he noted at a press conference last Monday, are employed by other government branches and in higher education.
The governor has urged other state officials to make job cuts of their own, but so far the response has been mostly negative, with officials warning that they might not be able to provide the services required of them if they don’t have sufficient staffing.
Attorney General Patrick C. Lynch, for example, issued a statement urging Carcieri and legislators “to recognize that continued under-funding of critical operating functions hinders the Office of Attorney General’s constitutionally mandated mission, will definitely cost Rhode Island taxpayers more in the long run, and, if not addressed, could risk public safety.”
Within the executive branch, the governor has yet to say precisely where the cuts will be made: Will it be 50 jobs, say, at the R.I. Department of Health, or 10 at the R.I. Department of Labor and Training?
In an interview, Carcieri said he wants the workers who are slated to lose their jobs to hear it from their supervisors first. The majority of the jobs – 80 percent – are also governed by union contracts, and many others are subject to some protections, so “bumping” rules may result in workers moving from department to department for some time.
Still, the lack of information about what jobs, precisely, will be cut made it hard for observers to say last week whether they could support the governor’s plan.
“It’s too soon to know what and if any impact it will have … because we don’t know which jobs will be cut,” said Amy Kempe, spokeswoman for the Rhode Island Hospitality and Tourism Association.
Similarly, John Cronin, executive director of the R.I. Small Business Development Center at Johnson & Wales University, said he couldn’t predict how the cuts might affect small businesses, because “it depends upon who gets laid off.”
Cronin also asked the question on many people’s minds: “How are they going to sustain the services when they have fewer people? That’s a mystery.”
But the governor said the impact on services should not be substantial, because the state has focused its job-cutting initiative on “administrative structures.”
For two months, he noted, department leaders have been meeting at the University of Rhode Island’s Alton Jones facility to review how their offices are run – who handles finances, human resources, legal affairs, etc. – and that is where most of the cuts will be made.
“Every single department will be impacted; however, the impact will vary,” he said, because some have more “back-office” employees than others, and they must keep serving the public.
Carcieri did say that he expects the R.I. Office of Health and Human Services, which was created, in part, to streamline operations for health and human services agencies, to see a particularly large number of cuts.
Some critics of the governor’s plan have said he is focusing too much on cost-cutting rather than on enhancing revenue to support state operations. Carcieri took them head on at his press conference last week, reiterating that in his view, “we don’t have a revenue problem – we have a spending problem.”
In an interview, Carcieri vowed not to increase taxes, saying that ordinary Rhode Islanders cannot afford to pay more. But asked whether any of his critics really want to raise broad-based taxes – rather than perhaps review the efficacy of certain tax credits, for example – Carcieri said he doesn’t know what they want to do, but tax revenue from both individuals and businesses is growing, and what needs to happen is for spending growth to slow.
The General Assembly has been relying on one-time sources of revenue to balance the budget, Carcieri said, and it’s time for the state to tackle the problem for real.
“My goal is to finally deal with this, see if we can get our cost basis down and stabilize the financial picture, so that when we look out in ’09 going forward, that instead of seeing ever-rising deficits, because that’s what was forecast last year … that we can forecast out and say, based on the revenues that we have coming in, which are pretty good, and a slowdown in the rate of expenditures, that we can live within our means,” he said.
“That’s key,” he added, “because there’s a lot of areas where we need to invest more in the infrastructure of the state. In the roads and the bridges, we’ve got huge projects going in the transportation area, but there’s a lot of basic maintenance. We can’t put ourselves in a position of investing in those kinds of things unless we get our budget under control, and that’s what I’m trying to do, to put us in a better place.”
On that point, Carcieri’s message does resonate with business leaders.
John C. Gregory, president and CEO of the Northern Rhode Island Chamber of Commerce, said he doesn’t know enough about the job cuts plan to comment on it, but he does know that “we have a structural deficit problem that has to be solved,” and taxes in the state are already high.
“Smaller businesses have been feeling the pinch,” Gregory said. Job cuts shouldn’t be so severe “that the central services wouldn’t be provided,” he added, but “I don’t think anyone wants to see more taxes. It comes down to what we can afford.” •