Scott's budget proposal slashes state workforce

During his 2010 campaign for governor, Rick Scott promised on his website to deliver: "Operational efficiencies: A 5% reduction in the state's workforce will save almost $300 million." That promise was part of his 7-7-7 plan -- goals Scott planned to achieve within seven years, including to create over 700,000 jobs.

On Feb. 7, 2011, the Republican governor released his first budget covering a two-year period. We turned to a spreadsheet provided by Scott's office that showed in the current year, the state budget includes a total of 126,764.5 jobs. Scott's appropriations bill for the next two years shows the number of jobs down to 118,083.35 for the first year and 113,977.35 in the second year. (The state operates on a July 1-June 30 fiscal year, and we're in the 2010-2011 year now.)

That means that over two years, Scott's budget proposal would cut about 12,787.15 jobs. Scott's numbers show that about 2,030 of those jobs to be eliminated in the first year are currently vacant. That would result in cutting about 10 percent of the state's workforce over two years if we include the already-vacant jobs.
 

Jerry McDaniel, Scott's budget chief, speaking to a Senate budget committee meeting Feb. 9, confirmed those numbers: about 8,600 jobs cut the first year and and an additional 4,000 jobs the second year, he said.

To check on the dollar savings associated with those cuts in the workforce, we turned to Scott's budget documents that list job cuts and savings by two categories: operational efficiencies and programmatic efficiencies. While the operational efficiencies list states that it covers two years, the programmatic efficiencies document doesn't expressly state that -- but we are going to assume that it does, since Scott promised to prepare two-year budgets.

Within operational efficiencies, we found three separate totals for what Scott called "workforce savings," and we're using round numbers:

• Administrative/operational: $155 million.

• Mission creep and earmarks: $18 million.

• Consolidating, privatizing or reorganizing: $120 million.

Within programmatic efficiencies, we found another total for "workforce savings:" $214 million.

That brings Scott's total savings to about $507 million over two years.

We asked McDaniel after his committee appearance for a breakdown of savings for each year, but he said the personnel savings were simply included in the overall total reduction.

The state Legislature will have to approve the budget this spring, and it's unclear whether legislators will sign-on to Scott's plan for thousands of layoffs, which would put a dent in the state's more than $3 billion shortfall but also increase unemployment. Scott, though, has clearly proposed eliminating at least 5 percent of the state's workforce his first year with more to come, and the savings appear to be hundreds of millions of dollars. So we rate this promise In the Works.