State departments have now explained how they can eliminate more than 2,000 jobs. The plans and reasons, called a “business justification,” were posted online today.
Governor Phil Bredesen called for voluntary buyouts last month to balance the budget for the year that begins July 1st.
Earlier this week, his administration offered the buyouts to 12,000 employees, six times the number they need. Today, the governor addressed a major fear that employees may have.
“One of the dangers when you do this is always that people will use it as a way of trying to get rid of somebody they don’t like, or something like that. We have, I think, put extraordinary protections in place against that. Part of the reason for this business justification process, which was long, and arduous, and cost us some money, using the consultants, was to make sure that there was a business rationale for all the decisions that were being made.”
Bredesen is trying to eliminate about 5% of state positions, but the number varies by department.
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Departments approached the targets differently.
The Department of Correction needs 164 takers, but it has made more than 2,300 buyout offers. That’s 14 times the number of buyouts it needs.
The Department of Safety will try to get 79 people to accept the buyout. They’ll make 451 offers to get there. That’s almost six times the target number.
The governor says the plans posted today are part of the strategy to streamline state government without eliminating workers who actually meet the public.
“What I asked the agencies to do is to, to target the buyout, so we weren’t just, you know, buying out a lot of positions that had to be refilled again. These are ones where the agencies have agreed that they can keep those positions vacant. They don’t need to fill them.”
The official state website for the voluntary buyouts is here.
The “agency plans” which explain which positions have been targeted are here.
How to look at the plans:
• The “eligibility summary” appears to be the tightest explanation of the effects of the buyout plan on each agency. The Department of Human Services, one of the larger state departments, has a three-page summary. The last line shows that 1,438 offers have been sent out in an attempt to get 263 buyouts.
• The “Exhibit A- Agency Disclosure” shows where the targeted classes of employee are, and how old the holders of those positions are (without disclosing their names). For Human Services, that’s fifty-one pages.
• The “business justification” explains why a particular class of employee can be eliminated (or cut back – for instance, when only three of ten employees are expected to be bought out and the other seven left in place).
Bredesen says the departments are supposed to target administrative positions, not those employees who meet and serve the public.
“In some places where they’re closing an office, it might mean for someone, having to drive a little further to get to some office, or something like that, but on the whole, I think they’ve tried to target those things which will have an absolute minimum impact. I urged them to them to focus on middle management, which like in any business tends to get a little big around the middle…in these organizations, rather than direct service providers out there, and most of them have been able to get most of their cuts in those areas.”
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