By Michael E. Kanell
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
ATLANTA — The schools in Georgia are reopening this month, but crimped budgets are forcing many districts to make do with fewer teachers, bus drivers and cafeteria workers.
And while school systems may be the biggest target, thousands of other positions have been eliminated by state agencies and a range of local governments. Even firefighters and police face hiring freezes, unpaid furloughs, caps on overtime and some job cuts.
For budgets, it’s about balance. For households – and the economy – it’s about pain.
Some say that pain was inevitable, arguing that public payrolls were bloated and the alternative was raising taxes, which also would hurt the economy. Others contend the pain was poorly conceived and executed, as well as badly timed.
During previous recessions, the government rarely retreated. But over the past two years, partly because of the depth of the fallout from the financial and housing crises, the public sector in Georgia – federal, state and local – has shed 19,000 jobs. Yet in that same period, the private sector has gained 104,200.
That hiring has not been enough to help the 430,000 Georgians who are looking for work. And now government cuts are swelling their ranks. Three years after the national recession officially ended, Georgia’s jobless rate rose to 9 percent in June. About 15 percent of Georgia’s 4.3 million jobs are in the public sector. So cuts worsen the odds for all job-seekers and put stress on families that may already be strapped.
Not all the damage comes through job cuts.
Kaci Lane, a first-grade teacher at Taylor Primary School in Butler, is coping with a series of unpaid furlough days. She is a mother of two. Her husband attends nursing school, working just part time. “It’s tight – we’ve had to cut back,” she said.
They ditched their land-line phone. Date night with her husband used to be dinner at an Olive Garden or Red Lobster. But now, that notion usually gets tabled after considering the price of gas, the tab for a sitter and her diminished income.
Such decisions, when multiplied by millions of similar ones, keep the economy weak and job-seekers on the sidelines.
Cobb schools are likely to have five furlough days this year, said Connie Jackson, president of the Cobb County Association of Educators and a special needs teacher.
Meanwhile, health insurance premiums have been rising, up from $150 a month five years ago to more than $300 a month now, she said. “And that is something you have to have.”
Her salary will, in effect, be down $3,000 from last year, she said.
“My rent doesn’t go down. My utilities don’t go down. But my paycheck goes down,” said Jackson, a single parent of two boys. “Teenagers love name brands, but you have to do consignment stores. You have to clip coupons. We don’t go to nice restaurants anymore. Just fast food.”
Cobb is cutting about 350 positions, but using attrition to do it. That leaves the nearly 8,000 others in the county system anxious, but grateful, she said.
“God knows we are so lucky to have jobs,” Jackson said.
Smaller districts are in a virtual vise. They have fewer resources for government to fall back on, and when layoffs occur, the jobless have fewer options. Schools are often a county’s largest employer.
Even before the recession undercut tax coffers, local schools saw the state slashing its contributions, said Richard McCorkle, superintendent in Marion County.
“We have cut every year – every year,” he said. “People retire. We just have not replaced them.”
The district has cut teachers, lunchroom staff, maintenance and secretaries, as well as part-timers, he said.
“In a county like Marion, most of them have nowhere else to go to work,” McCorkle said. “It is tougher in rural areas to find a job.”
Faced with a steady plunge in state aid, nearby Stewart County, the state’s poorest, has taken even more drastic measures.
The schools open only four days a week. They have chopped out 10 days of pay in furloughs for teachers and administrators. And they’ve laid off more than 20 people, said Floyd Fort, the district’s superintendent.
He also has lost two weeks of pay. Fort said he watches the thermostat carefully, combines errands when he has to drive his truck and doesn’t travel on weekends the way he used to.
Yet the public sector is not only a story of shrinkage. As the recession deepened, many Georgians flocked to colleges and universities to gain new skills. The result has been a hiring boom in higher education. The number working for the Board of Regents is up 7.4 percent in four years. The rest of state government employment has fallen by 14.3 percent.
But except for that, the story is one of austerity – at nearly all levels and most departments. And the Regents’ hiring binge may be over. The governor has asked state agencies to find another $553 million in reductions through June 2014. About one-fifth of that would come from the university system.
Unlike the federal government, which prints its own currency and can run a deficit indefinitely, state and local governments must match costs and revenue.
Very few governments are willing to raise taxes, so for most, cutting is the only route back to balance. Because schools are the largest part of local budgets – and salaries the lion’s share of that – teachers have been the most common targets. But they are not the only targets.
Kelvin Cochran, Atlanta’s fire chief, said his department took a hit of more than $14 million in 2009, losing 145 positions, including many firefighters. Further hiring was frozen and remaining employees endured a 10 percent furlough, he said.
Since then, Atlanta’s finances have rebounded and the department is back to its previous employment, he said.
But many municipalities are still struggling. Cartersville has lost five positions, said Scott Carter, who’s the city’s fire chief and president of the Georgia State Firefighters Association.
For police, there have been relatively few layoffs in Georgia, but departments have used other cost-cutting measures – like furloughs or caps on overtime – that crimp employee pay, said Frank Rotondo, executive director of the Georgia Association of Chiefs of Police.
For state government itself, the ax started falling in the depths of the recession, after sales tax revenues plunged. Proportionally, the knife has cut deeper in some small agencies, like the Georgia Firefighters Standards and Training Council.
“Budget cuts started in 2008 and they haven’t quit,” said Lyn Pardue, executive director of the council, which oversees hundreds of local fire services. “We had 10 people on staff. We are down to eight.”
Georgia’s job market is weak, in part because of cutbacks in public schools and other government operations due to tighter budgets. On the plus side, the private sector continues to grow, especially in health care.
Copyright 2012 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution