I was invited to Sacramento County Joint Labor Management meeting today to see what the state of the County Budget is for the next couple of years. This meeting was called by Steve Keil, the Director of Labor Relations, for all the Recognized Employee Organizations (REO). The County Leadership Group put together by Steve Szalay, the Interim County CEO, was in attendance. This group contained Steve Szalay; Nav Gill, Chief Operations Officer; Mark Norris, Administrator of Internal Services Agency; Jan Scully, Sacramento County District Attorney; Sheriff John McGinness; Robert A. Ryan, Jr., County Counsel; Paul Hahn, Municipal Services Agency Administrator and Bruce Wagstaff, Countywide Services Agency Administrator. This was the first of future monthly meetings that are for open discussions of what lies ahead for the County Budget and how it will affect County workers.
In the meeting, Management gave out a real rough estimate of where it looks like the County Budget will be for the next four years. For next fiscal year starting in July of 2010, if they remove the furloughs and give us our COLA, they estimate the number of layoffs would be about 550 people Countywide but only 12.6 positions in Data Processing with only 7.2 positions in the General Fund. This is very early but I thought you ought to know about what is being talked about now.
If you have any insight into solving the budget shortfall, please email me at President@dppa.org so I can have your ideas at the next Joint Labor Management meeting which will take place on February 17th, 2010.
