State jobs on rise again in Florida (Crist has less disdain for state workers than Jeb)

[seafan]

State jobs on rise again

By BILL COTTERELL
The News-Press Capital Bureau
December 30, 2007

TALLAHASSEE - Gov. Charlie Crist has ended an eight-year decline in state employment, but the average salaries of workers in Florida's government agencies and their rate of pay raises lag behind money most might make in the private sector.
In a departure from ex-Gov. Jeb Bush's personnel policies, the state's year-end Annual Workforce Report explodes two widely held beliefs of the Republican-run Legislature -that state government is a bloated bureaucracy and that its operating costs are disproportionately burdensome for Florida taxpayers.

Crist's administration quietly reinstated two measurements that Bush had deleted from the annual personnel report, ranking Florida third from the bottom in its ratio of state employees, per capita, and dead last in cost of personnel per taxpayer.
Besides slumping salaries, the state also short-changes its staff on training, said Linda South, head of the Department of Management Services. DMS is required to compile the annual compendium of facts and figures on state personnel.

.....

State Sen. Al Lawson, D-Tallahassee, has represented state employees in the Big Bend area since 1982. As head of the Senate Governmental Operations Committee, Lawson said Crist has changed the climate in Tallahassee.
"Bush rewarded cutting work force and many of the agencies were reacting, even though they knew they would be short staffed," said Lawson.

.....

"It's a whole change in attitude toward state employees," he said.

The annual report indicates that Crist has presided over the first growth in total state government employment since the late Gov. Lawton Chiles started the decline in his last year - a reduction that Bush accelerated with privatization and computerization.

.....

The annual report said Florida has 106 full-time state workers per 10,000 population - third from the bottom, above only Illinois (103) and Nevada (104).

Florida also posted the lowest payroll cost per taxpayer at $36 last year. The national average was $56, the DMS study said.

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“There would be no greater tribute to our maturity as a society than if we can make these buildings around us empty of workers—silent monuments to the time when government played a larger role than it deserved or could adequately fill.”----Jeb Bush, in his re-inaugural address, standing on the steps of the old state capitol in Tallahassee, January, 2003

It looks like the largest source of bloat and burden in Florida state government was Jeb.

[porphyrian]

1. As Tallahassee has the majority of the state jobs in Florida, and as that's a large part...

...of the local economy (state jobs, that is), we knew he was full of shit both terms. And while Crist may be more government worker-friendly than JEB!, there is still a freeze on creating new positions in most of government and a freeze on raises, as well as rumors of further position elimination in the near future to meet the budget.