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Florida's State Flage
Florida now has lost ground, again, in teacher salaries, behind Louisiana and Kentucky, coming in at No. 29; we are also below Alabama in the amount of per student spending.
During this past month, a state government report disproved two politically popular assumptions about the size and cost of state bureaucracy. For the fiscal year ending last June, Florida ranked last in the nation in both its per-taxpayer cost of state personnel and its ratio of state employees to residents. One Representative in the Legislature was open about the problem. Representative Vasilinda was quoted as saying:
"If it's true that government should be run more like a business, let's run it more like an excellent business……We are handing our employees important work to do and asking each one of them to shoulder more and more responsibility. Their pay, however, isn't even keeping up with the cost of living."
Sen. Al Lawson, D-Tallahassee, who has represented large numbers of state workers in the Legislature for 26 years, said he hopes the numbers will help convince Republican legislative leaders that state employees deserve pay raises in the 2009 session. But with the state economy in recession and tax collections slumping, Lawson said that's not likely.
"What we need to do is put state workers first," said Lawson, the Senate Democratic leader.
The Department of Management Services' annual study said that - after declining under ex-Gov. Jeb Bush - the number of established positions in all of state government grew from 171,333 on June 30, 2007, to 173,486 last June 30.
More than two-thirds of all state job growth came in the State University System, which went from 41,827 to 43,288 employees. The judicial system picked up 605 positions.
The size of the State Personnel System, which includes 65 percent of all state jobs, inched up from 112,373 positions in the previous year to 112,459 by mid-2008. But the number of people holding those positions in 30 state departments fell from 104,960 to 104,249. The difference in positions and people is mostly jobs left open as state government has cut back its budget.
Even the state's largest agency, the prison system, lost nearly 300 employees.
The day after these reports were announced, all agencies were ordered to hold back 1 percent of their operational spending, because of sluggish state revenue collections. That meant hiring freezes, or near-freezes, in many agencies.
"If you drill down past the numbers and charts, these are lives affected by what's in this report," said Rep. Alan Williams, D-Tallahassee. "These are people needing services from the state not getting them. These numbers tell me we've cut to the bone already."
Two key charts that Jeb Bush stopped compiling when he embarked on a journey of discarding government workers were reinstated last year by the new Governor (also a Republican) Charlie Crist. They showed that Florida has 118 full-time employees per 10,000 residents and that payroll costs were $36 per state resident - both numbers lowest in the nation. The national average is 214 state employees per 10,000 residents and $66 in salary costs per resident.
Want some more facts and figures? In no particular order, Florida’s public schools had the lowest overall graduation rate in the nation with 55% of students graduating, followed by Georgia, the District of Columbia, and Arizona.
When it comes to Foster care, we are in the top three states in number of children languishing in a dysfunctional Child Protective System
Of all the states, we spend the least sum per capita than any other state in infrastructure, bridge repairs, school construction.
Interested in our expenditures on health care and insurance coverage and public clinics?
According to the Trust for America’s Health, a well-respected research organization,
We rank 2nd and 4th among the 50 states in the number of children and adults with no insurance.
We are Nos. 2 and 3 in the number of children and adults with active AIDS, and the list goes on and on.
Our state’s economy is a total disaster. While the rest of the country is suffering from a severe recession, our situation is worse. Our economy is based on construction, housing and tourists, all areas that are the first to falter and the last to recover.
State government faces a revenue shortfall of more than $2.2 billion.
As is the case with all of the states, we cannot have deficits; expenditures must be met not just passed on to our grandchildren, as it is done on the Federal level. We do not have an income tax in spite of leading economists’ statements that a broad based progressive tax would be fairer than the reliance on sale and property taxes.
So what solution does the Republican dominated Legislature bring to the table?
Lower taxes and cut services.
That should do it.
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