From the Central Valley Business Times:
Kern County may impose a hiring freeze as one way to curtail costs in the face of an estimated deficit of between $46 million and $66 million for the coming fiscal year that starts July 1.
The county’s board of supervisors will consider a virtual freeze on county hiring as well as curtailing non-personnel spending at their meeting Tuesday.
Bakersfield.com:
County Administrative Officer Ron Errea will deliver a proposal asking the board to give him the power to clamp down on county hiring and spending.
All new hires — and hiring of county “extra help” part-timers — would have to be approved by Errea’s office.
7 comments:
Don't let them get away with this. These are not revenue shortfalls or budget deficits. These are overspending problems. Ask them why the FY 05 or FY 04 budgets cannot be used to model the new FY 09 budget and you will get nothing but excuses. Was '05 bad? Was '04? Why not adopt a budget that most likely the majority of the existing board has previously adopted?
La City and County in deep shit also:
LATimes.com (LA is Fucked)
Every City and County in California are screwed. All the surplus the last few years went to the public employee's retirement. Think about it did services from local governments increase the last few years?
Good point there Perfect Storm... During the biggest real estate boom in history, the Golden State somehow had to borrow (using bonds) to meet its current spending needs.
With a recession on the horizon we are truly screwed.
Public employees reitirement is nuts, those bastards can get up to 100% or more of their salary if they work it right. The whole system is just out right fraud on the California taxpayer. I would say about 80% of our local governments financial departments do not posess the skills to handle the coming crisis. Most Counties and Cities in California are committing fraud, due to blatant accounting errors they know about, but refuse to fix and that is fraud, but no one does anything about it.
Most CPA firms that perform audits of government in California just give a rubber stamp.
Ventura County is staffed by eminently qualified, informed and effective financial experts and we are still screwed. They'll track our death spiral to two decimal places and file all the reports on time in triplicate.
Government jobs and agencies are nothing but islands of Socialism, with all the waste and inefficiencies that goes with it.
Most of the services provided by government employees could easily be privatized, with the lowest bidder getting the contract. The savings realized would take care of the problem, especially with the elimination of long term retirement benefits.
Those of us in the private sector have no parental authority figure to provide for our every need. Why should “Public Servants”?
BTW: By definition, all retail businesses “serve the public.”
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