Suffolk County to Cut 315 Jobs

Bad news for the civil servants of Suffolk County. The Suffolk County legislature has gone ahead and approved a job cut of about 315 jobs. The jobs will be official by the 1^st of July.  Notices will be sent out to impacted workers by the end of the next  week. For the time being the county is not giving out any information about which positions, or types of positions they are cutting, leaving many workers to languish for a week while they find out whether or not they are going to be one of the ones going off of the payroll and onto the unemployment line.

All that we do know is that the cuts will be impacting jobs that have been kept on the payroll over the last couple of years thanks to state and federal grant money. The grants, which were designed to help get states through the worst of the economic troubles and give them time to figure out how to reduce expenses without cutting jobs on a massive level, will be expiring with the start of the next fiscal year.

The county’s budget has a hole that is expected to go as high as $530 million by the time that all is said and done next year. The cuts that are being made to staffing during this round of cuts will save about $11.4 million of those cuts.

Of course this is not the first time that the specter of layoffs has come to the workers of Suffolk County. Many of their jobs were threatened, and cut, in a set of sweeping cuts made by the city of New York. For those of you who missed out on the truly epic plans the city had for cutting county workers in all five of the city’s borough here is an expert from our earlier coverage  that will get you up to speed in no time at all:

“Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York has announced the county-by-county breakdown of the more than 3000 jobs that will be lost during the newest round of layoffs for New York State. As it turns out almost 30 percent of the 3,496 jobs that are slated to be cut by the state come from Albany County. Other counties that are expect to be hit hard by the cuts include New York County. Erie county, Broome county and Duchess county. For a break down of the job losses by individual county check the listings at the end of this piece.

The layoffs were begun last week, with official notices being sent out after the Public Employees Federation, a union for civil servants in the state of New York; choose to vote down a tentative contract agreement. This agreement, which could have prevented at least some of the current layoffs, may still be re-negotiated in time. It would not be the first time that civil servants layoffs were reversed by the signing of a contract with the union.

It is important to note that the number of layoffs that are being suggested by the state overall are much higher than the number proposed at the county level. The county level of layoffs only consists of about one third of the total number layoffs that will need to be made. The total number of layoffs that Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration said was needed in order to balance the states budget will total roughly 9,800 jobs lost. No word was given on how this plan may be mitigated by any state employees retiring this year.”