If you don’t live in the Golden State you may not be aware that California is facing a budget deficit of approximately twelve squillion dollars. Jerry Brown, who replaced Arnold Schwarzenegger as governor last week, has inherited the mess and has started slashing expenses. (Or, at least he’s announcing cuts in expenses.)
And I got a chuckle out one of his first targets: the apparently indiscriminate assignment of taxpayer-paid cell phones to 96,000 state employees. Brown’s cutting the cordless to half of them, with an expected savings of $20M per year.
I agree with him that it stretches credulity to think that all those functionaries require 24x7 ties to the job. I actually think that no one needs round-the-clock connectivity to his/her employer; when colleagues start thinking they can reach you at the same time Conan does, there’s a lot of both arrogance and inefficiency going on.
Which, of course, are probably not in short supply in the state government. As anyone who’s tried to get a driver’s license can tell you.
And, speaking of the DMV, Brown’s also going to make users of their 12,000 light vehicles justify the business case for retaining them. That’s going to bite, and I fully expect the agencies to squawk big time over it. In the past it hasn’t been unknown for a group to assign an official car to staff members for commuting in order to drive up the mileage and thus justify the need for having it in the pool.
And compared with the delta of $25.5B, this is just chipping off some of the edges.
Still—$20M here, $14M there. After a while you’re talking real money.
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