While UCONN football fans try to figure out the best way to get to Birmingham, Alabama (Looks like Southwest), the State of Connecticut is trying to figure out how to pay its bills. It isn’t going well.
After months of paying unemployment benefits to the swelled ranks of the unemployed, the State’s Unemployment Fund is out of cash. The State is putting the tab on its credit card until the recession ends.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg. The Governor and Legislative Republicans have dueling deficit mitigation plans out – though neither is happy with the other’s proposal.
The Governor is asking for a 3% cut to municipal aid, which has Mayors and First Selectmen across the state chewing their fingernails.
Legislative Republicans, led by potential gubernatorial candidates Larry Cafero and John McKinney, are suggesting that state agencies take the brunt of the cuts, not municipalities.
Democratic Leaders will likely reveal their own plan in the coming days.
4 responses so far ↓
We might be able to borrow the needed funds directly from China; you know, eliminate the middle man.
There’s a good debate on the worth of saving public jobs at the NYT today.
http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/06/should-public-sector-jobs-come-first/
I heard the argument in CT put forth by an agency head: The 2001/023 layoffs were a disaster because too many senior workers took early retirement and too many junior workers were laid off.
As the argument goes, the ‘agency culture’ was undermined by the lack of senior leadership and the lack of worker bees brought productivity way down as mid-level workers hesitated to pick up the slack by doing the work of the worker bees. (Generally by pulling out their job descriptions and issuing the veiled threat: “Make me an acting manager or else. I’m not doing worker bee work.”)
The message was that the time between downturns is too short to continue disrupting staff in that manner. By the time Junior Staff is trained and productive layoffs start again.
Heath, love the headline. “Cause of Starvation: Famine.”
Now, what to do. Rell and GOP plans are fine, but as we have seen, pointless. Neither will come to anything, and the Dems will raise taxes on the 4 wealthy people who will be left in Greenwich by the 2nd quarter on 2010.
Moody’s downgrade of CT debt has some good information on unfunded pension and benefit liabilities. Currently it’s about 1.6 billion a year.
http://74.6.239.67/search/cache?ei=UTF-8&p=state+of+CT++pension+obligation&fr=yfp-t-701&u=www.ct.gov/governorrell/lib/governorrell/moodys_report.doc&w=state+ct+connecticut+pension+obligation&d=TmhQcd29T3jf&icp=1&.intl=us&sig=K8iO49o7xaKZbJO8iJi3qw–
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