Governor Says Rising Numbers of Buyouts No Mystery

Governor Phil Bredesen says the state is now seeking almost 2,300 buyouts of state employees, up from the original 2,011. He says there’s nothing mysterious about the expanding number to balance next year’s budget.

“I mean, what do you want me to say? When we put the number on the table of twenty-one hundred, it was taking an average salary and deciding how many people you would have to, you would have to buy out at that average salary to get to the dollar numbers you needed. When they got down and did the detail work in the thing, they had a slightly higher number, presumably because some of the salaries were on the average, lower. We got to the total dollar number of the buyout that we needed.”

Last week, state employees complained about inconsistencies from department to department in the buyout plan.

Today, the Governor defended department commissioners. He said they found

management problems that had become “embedded” in state administration. And, he praised the effort to trim middle management jobs.

Bredesen said some senior Tennessee Highway Patrol officer positions – captains and a lieutenant colonel – will fall to achieve that goal.

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Bredesen repeated his original intention to cut middle management.

“I think that the way we did it, which was to, not just do an across-the-board buyout, or across-the-board cut, or a seniority-based cut or something like that, but just to ask the commissioners to sit down and think like business executives, or executives, about how they might run their departments with fewer people and target it in that way, ensures that there will be the minimal impact.”

“And frankly, from what I’ve seen so far, there are some very good things coming out of this buyout. I mean, there are some middle management structures that are ’way overblown out there, and probably are hurting the ability to provide services, that are going to be cleaned up as a result of doing this. I think it’s, on the whole, going to be very healthy for state government.”

Bredesen says that commissioners are not targeting particular employees.

“First of all, let’s be careful with our words. I mean, there are no positions that have been targeted in the sense that, the sense that someone said, ‘I want to get rid of this person,’ or something like that. Everything has been done with an elaborate business justification which has been public, published for the world, the world to see. This is a voluntary buyout, and I believe from everything I have that we are going to get a sufficient number of people in the voluntary buyout that the issue just goes away.”