Detroit To Cut More Jobs

It look like things are getting a job in the city of Detroit is going to get a lot harder then it was before. Not that it has been easy in the last couple of years as the city of Detroit has been rocked by major changes  to the budget. The city, via  Deputy Mayor Kirk Lewis, has decided to cut a serious amount of the budget and layoffs are definitely on the table. Of course, we will not know the extent of the damage right now, the city Deputy Mayor Kirk Lewis and the City Council still have to reach some kind of an agreement as to the exacts, but the proposal on the table already includes some serious changes.

First on the block is public transportation. If the proposal goes through the city would privatize it in order to save money. Next up are the  firefighters who will be retrained to act as the city’s first responders as well, implying heavily that other first responders will be cut back on. Other departments are on the table for closures, reductions in services and consolidations, though at the current moment the names of departments on the block have not been mentioned.  Currently the City Council members believe that only the police force and the fire department are going to be spared from the current wave of cuts.

All of these changes are needed for the city to deal with a coming years deficit that is larger than $100 million and long terms debts held by the city that are in excess of $12 billion.

All in all some city officials are looking to have as many as 1,000 workers let go by the end of spring  and if all goes according to plan the city may have to do just that. For now there is no talking with the unions or other agreements, as the budget has to be passed before those kinds of negotiations can begin.

Of course then news on government budgets is grim everywhere. For those of you who missed out on our earlier coverage of the situation in California here is an excerpt that will get you up to speed in no time at all:

“It looks like things are getting much, much worse for the schoolteachers in the state of California. We have been talking a lot, in the last couple of weeks and months about the kinds of cuts that are being made to the schools in the state. In a lot of cases those cuts are being made in generic terms we know how many workers are going to be let go, but we do not know how many of them will be classroom teachers. Today we had some light shed on those numbers.

According to information released by the California Teachers Association an estimated 19,500 classroom teachers were given layoff notices over the past couple of weeks. The layoff notices had to be given by the 15^th of March in order to be legal under the laws of the state of California. So if an educator did not get a layoff notice by that date then they are free and clear, at least until next years deadline.

The cuts, which are coming because of the need to cut 20 Billion in funding from the state education budget. Unless the schools get a tax increase from voters in the near future, which is on the ballet, the schools will have to make these cuts, which average out to about $370 per student in the state. The only good news for schools is that the number of enrolled students at California schools is, depending on where you live, either staying stable or shrinking.”