Colorado Cuts Civil Service Jobs

It looks like bad news is coming to workers in the state of Colorado because if the current budget stays in place there will substantial layoffs from a number of critical states services.  The budget in question, which has already been approved by the state legislature’s Joint Budget Committee, will call for some very hefty layoffs to state personnel. What kinds of jobs are on the chopping block? Well, if all stays the way that it has been the cuts will look something like this:

• A minimum of 10 state troopers will be let go.
• At least 20 jobs will come from mental-health facility workers in the state.
• A minimum of 15 job cuts will be taken by professional caregivers for the developmentally disabled.
• At least 80 jobs will be cut from correctional facilities workers.
• About 10 of the layoffs will come from workers at Department of Motor Vehicles offices.

These are only part of the 500 job cuts that are expected to go through under the current budget plans. After the budget was approved the office of John Hickenlooper, the state governor released a statement saying that the cuts would, “negatively affect the levels of service provided to Colorado’s citizens and will degrade employee safety.”

Though, it looks like the members of the Joint Budget Committee already knew about this. Some of the representatives have said that they knew that these cuts were all unlikely to stand in the long run and the vote was only passed as a political compromise between the Republicans and the Democrats on the committee. They are expecting to make changes in order to come to a compromised that will keep both sides happy and not cut back on vital services in the state.

So, there is some hope that these cuts will be overturned and that a plan that involves fewer job cuts can be put into place. Since this was a compromise position already however, forcing these changes to be made may require outside pressure and some concessions from the workers unions. There was some earlier talk of job cuts by attrition, but they were not sound to be sufficient to make the needed corrections to the budget.

Colorado is, of course, not the only state that is dealing with immense budget pressures, thanks to a combination of decreased federal funding and lower amounts of revenue from tax collection.  In California cuts are heavily affecting the law enforcement community. For those of you who missed out on our earlier coverage here is an excerpt:

“The cuts are being tied directly to the number of workers who are currently in the prison system. Since the prison system currently has about 14,000 fewer inmates now then when the program to cut jobs was originally conceived it is likely that by the end of the layoffs more jobs will be cut than were originally expected. Though, some of the currently filled positions may be instead corrected by attrition, depending on the number of inmates in the prison by the end of the project.

The layoff project, which has been called ”realignment” was launched on Oct. 1st of last year. The layoff letters were give out to the workers, along with the WARN notices on Thursday and Friday of last week.”