Idea of State Pay Cut Falls Flat

Idea of state pay cut falls flat
Bill Cotterell • News Journal Capital Bureau • March 22, 2009

TALLAHASSEE — Florida taxpayers could save about $300 million by imposing a 5 percent pay cut on state employees, but the idea landed with a resounding thud in the State Capitol last week.

Gov. Charlie Crist, who proposed no pay raises in his budget but also didn’t call for any layoffs, said he doesn’t like the idea.

House and Senate members took a 5 percent salary hit in last year’s budget, and another is on the table for the year starting next July, but Senate budget chief J.D. Alexander said no major spending decisions are anywhere near final yet.
“We’ve considered 10,000 things,” said Alexander, R-Lake Wales. “At this point, we have not proposed anything.”

Alexander, who floated the idea of pay cuts in response to a question, said salary cuts of 10 percent would be unfair to employees with mortgages, car payments and child-support obligations.

Cuts, if any, could be graduated — exclude the lowest-paid workers, possibly taking 5 percent in the mid-range and a bit more in the highest pay scales.
Agriculture Commissioner Charles Bronson illustrated the hardship, on both his agency and its employees, during his presentation to a general-government budget panel.

“We still have people in the Division of Forestry today who qualify for food stamps on a state paycheck,” said Bronson.

Forestry agents, whose duties include fighting fires, start at $24,580 and a senior clerk in the division starts at $21,533. A 5 percent pay cut would cost a beginning forest ranger $1,229 a year — about $23 a week.

“I could hardly believe that instead of the state employees getting a pay increase they have a proposal to get a pay cut of 5 percent,” said Ida Smith of Tallahassee, a 30-year Department of Transportation employee who advocates for state retirees in the Capitol.

Sen. Al Lawson, D-Tallahassee, expressed confidence that pay cuts won’t be in the final budget that goes to Crist’s desk in May.

He and Jeanette Wynn, state president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, said state workers are a convenient whipping boy for legislators from areas with relatively few government employees — especially when those legislators have constituents losing jobs.
“It’s just an insult to employees that they would even be considering something like this, after three years of not giving them a raise,” said Wynn.

Lawson noted that Florida ranks last in the nation for per-capita size and cost of state personnel.

Department of Management Services figures indicate that the state payroll costs the average Floridian $36 a year and that the state has 118 employees p er 10,000 in population.

The average state worker salary was $38,839 as of June 30.

The average for Career Service workers, who make up about two-thirds of the state work force, was $34,508 — about $5,000 below the average wage in the private sector across Florida, according to state Agency for Workforce Innovation figures.