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State Rep. Turner pushes $100M for state employees
State Rep. Mike Turner (D-Old Hickory) is pushing a $100 million budget amendment to prevent layoffs of state employees for one year.
As part of $468 million in cuts to next year’s budget, Gov. Phil Bredesen is proposing cutting 2,011 state jobs through voluntary buyouts.
If not enough employees take the voluntary buyout, Bredesen has said involuntary layoffs would be necessary.
Turner, as well as 53 co-sponsors he says he has, wants to keep those layoffs from happening. He is proposing using up to $100 million of the state’s $750 million rainy day fund to prevent any layoffs of state employees for one year.
“It’s there to ensure that there’s going to be some protection for the employees up to a year,” Turner said.
The buyouts could still proceed under Turner’s amendment.
The Bredesen administration has argued it’s too early in the economic downturn to dip into the rainy day fund.
Bredesen’s $50 million buyout package won’t be offered until about June 6.
Lawmakers are continuing to wrangle over the details of the budget, but concern for the lack of detail on the buyout packages are growing.
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Commissioner Goetz spent a lot of time last week explaining exactly why using the Rainy Day Fund to save public employees would damage the state credit rating. In fact, Mike Turner seemed to be saying that the Rainy Day Fund should be used to ride out the problems with revenues. The Commissioner set him up for that idea after telling the people at the 07 MAY 08 legislative meeting that data going back to the Sixties indicates that the economy has never taken more than five quarters to turn around. Representative Turner had an interesting comment about how unfortunate that this problem was not detected earlier and maybe the budget should have been done earlier. The obvious question that I never heard asked is: "Why is it that you claim to see into the future for more than a year but could not see in December 07 that we would have this meeting in May 08? "
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Rep. Turner sounds like a pandering whore. So is everyone but the government supposed to endure a little belt-tightening. If you ask me, the buyout idea is a better package than many of those "employees" deserve.
One thing the Governor failed to mention is that all of the positions he wants to do away with aren't elligable for the buyout. He is wanting to do away with entire divisions within departments. Most of those employees are only elligable for unemployment.Some of what he want's to do will open the State up to more lawsuites and violations of current agreements which will cost the taxpayers yet even more money.
Oh yea shinestx, everyone knows that Gov't employees don't do anything but waste Oxygen and siphon valuable taxdollars. In fact,instead of a buyout, why don't we just fire them all? Wouldn't that be cool?.....Right?.... Bueller?