Welcome to Change......Prepare for the PAIN!!!
July 22, 2009
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Furloughs taking toll on local government workers
They are the lucky ones – the municipal workers who still have jobs and readily acknowledge their good fortune.
But government downsizing takes a toll: reduced hours, increased workloads because of layoffs and early retirements, and reduced pay. The state's tentative agreement for solving its budget crisis adds more pressure.
In Folsom's Finance Department, they sit in quiet cubicles, hurrying to meet the deadlines of payroll processing. They work faster these days because unpaid furloughs have squeezed available work hours.
In Woodland, they hold forth in the public lobby of the Yolo County Department of Employment and Social Services, offering guidance to a stream of people desperate for help.
These workers, like their counterparts in Lincoln, Sacramento and elsewhere, are carrying out the work of formerly larger staffs. They are the faces of hard times in city and county government.
Increasingly, stress is the standard outcome.
How do they unwind from the intensity of their jobs?
"We go home and go to sleep," said Sharon Heckley, Folsom disbursements specialist. "I am in bed by 8 o'clock."
"We're totally exhausted," said Jackie Schrader, a city Finance Department accountant who spends half her time in payroll and half in accounting.
http://www.sacbee.com/topstories/story/2045125.html
The above is just the beginning.....we still haven't seen the effects of the upcoming cuts.....
Roads will be rougher, classrooms fuller and textbooks more tattered. The odds of encountering someone fresh out of prison will almost certainly be higher.
If the budget deal crafted by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and top legislative leaders is passed by the Legislature and survives the inevitable court challenges, California will undergo perhaps the biggest downscaling of government in its history.
Students and the poor will notice the biggest changes from downscaling of the government.
Those who will notice the biggest changes will be students and the poor as class sizes increase and health and welfare benefits shrink. The pace of government-sponsored redevelopment will slow, and some state parks will close.
"These cuts are real, they're going to be felt, they're going to be seen," said state Supt. of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-impact22-2009jul22,0,2501792.story
Guess how many millions of students and poor in California are going to "feel" the cuts....while trillions go to the banks......
And now we are going to release prisoners, prosecute fewer crimes, and there is no employment available even for those that want to work.
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