Governor Says Federal Stimulus Could Save Some State Workers

Governor Phil Bredesen says the possibility of massive federal aid will make it easier to fix next year’s state budget. He says the federal stimulus package could legitimately be used to keep from having to lay off state workers.

“It has a component which is designed …clearly just to help the states. And certainly helping them keep people employed…I mean, is a stimulus in its own right. Most of the stimulus is designed to create or save, or save jobs.”

Lieutenant Governor Ron Ramsey says he’s ready to help the governor reduce the payroll but wants to stretch out the process, buying time to get rid of state employee positions without having to get rid of people.

“And so we could do this through attrition, that gives us two years to do that. The governor kinda used the example, it gives us two years to kinda feather in where we want to be, and I’m encouraging him to look at this as a two-year plan.”

As for the infrastructure component of a potential federal stimulus, the governor says Tennessee has nearly $900 million worth of road and bridge projects, plus another $700 million worth of projects ready to go.

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The governor says Tennessee has a waiting list of projects that can be started on short notice, but that’s because road funds have been down in the past few years.

“Probably helped a little bit, if I can use that word, by the fact that we’ve been so short of road money over the last two or three years both because of what the gas tax has done and the federal government money… has done. That we actually have a good backlog of projects that are truly ready to go.”

For the last two years the U.S. government has reduced the amount of road funds coming to the state, and gasoline revenues dropped as the price of gasoline went up and people bought and used fewer gallons.