Well, the good governor has announced that he's going to have to lay off nearly 9000 state employees in July because the unions won't agree to concessions. True, the unions have said no deal to his proposals. But then the governor stated that the unions haven't offered any other suggestions to help close the budget deficit ... and that is pure political BS. Is the governor deaf? Or perhaps the unions' proposals weren't written in braille? To the unions' credit, they have suggested several proposals for helping out, and they've done so since the day the governor began talking about union concessions. (The concessions include a 5 day payroll lag, forgoing the 3% COLA that's due in April, instituting another pension tier, and increasing the retirement vesting to 10 yrs) So, what's gonna happen? The online version of the Albany newspaper is full of reader comments with lots of suggestions, and it seems that one of the most popular ones is a move to offer early retirement incentives to current employees. Many school districts are doing just that right now, and that's reducing their payroll costs immensely. Makes sense to me ... you'd cut down on pension payments (most of those close to retirement are tier 1 or tier 2, with loads of pension bennies), reduce healthcare contributions by the state, and lower the average wage across the state employee system. Of course the governor hasn't done himself any favors by buying all sorts of goodies for himself at the executive mansion, hiring a bunch of his cronies at pretty high wages, and then giving raises to lots of his staff. NYS still has a lt. governor's staff on the payroll, even though there hasn't been a lt. gov. in office since Paterson took over for Spitzer! Go figure.
Guess we'll just have to wait and see what the deal is.
The sun is shining once again, and it's slightly warmer today ... maybe spring is really here.
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