The governor’s office has put out a long list of budget cuts — $135 million in all — that go beyond the concessions deal struck with state unions. These are attributed to the research that went into making the just-for-show Plan B budget.
Mostly, these cuts are low-hanging fruit — wiping vacant jobs from the books, adjusting for retirements and cutting casino bus runs from the Department of Social Services’ budget.
And some of it is maddeningly vague. The list starts with a holdback of $7,110 for the governor’s office attributed to ‘reduce other expenses to achieve savings.’
We do applaud the governor for taking an aggressive stand on reducing overtime — targeting an $800,000 savings in Health Care Services at the Department of Veterans Affairs, $331,000 in the Department of Education, and $1.1 million at the Department of Transportation. We hope he can make all that stick.
He also sees a $6.2 million saving in ‘revised time off allotment’ within the Department of Corrections. Didn’t like the concessions deal, eh?
There’s also a certain amount of sleight of hand involved. Payments for some vehicles are spread out over five years instead of four, for example. There are savings in copying, printing and postage costs plus $591,000 in ‘legal/legislative library materials’ from the state library account. And he’s projecting a savings of $101,000 by launching a fundraising effort on behalf of the horse guards. Governor Malloy thus adds a whole new meaning to pony up.
But a few savings strike us as fool’s gold.
Take the $1 million to be saved by whacking the ‘Microsoft Enterprise Agreement Maintenance Contract’ and other unspecified IT contracts. When the computer systems need work — and they will — who do you call and at what price? Maybe this is really a jobs program.
There is another $2.7 million in unspecified technology savings from the Board of Regents account; $1.9 million from UConn and $2.9 million from UConn’s Health Center. Are we backing away from electronic health records?
Or the decisions to delay installation of a security system at the police training facility in Meriden and bringing alarm system monitoring in-house. And what could go wrong with saving $400,000 by reducing security at state buildings? After all, Homeland Security phased out the color-coded terrorism alert system.
It’s hard to call $135 million small change; it’s real money. But we remain skeptical that the state will realize even these modest savings.
As the private sector can attest, doing more with less is a great slogan but an impossible task without significant re-engineering that eliminates some tasks. The elimination of structural overtime — a hideous result of a union culture — is a great first step. But when pared with the decision not to fill vacancies or hire to backfill, it’s a recipe for problems unless the workload is also reduced.
Deferring maintenance and reducing the janitorial schedule seem like more of the smoke-and-mirrors accounting Malloy criticized from previous administrations.
The way out of this problem involves harder choices than these. State government has to shrink. Without these one-time savings to turn to next year, maybe it will be time to actually get down to facing those hard choices.