We're not officially back from vacation until tomorrow, but we wanted to highlight an opinion piece in today's fiber/cyber Bee from J.J. Jelincic, former president of the California State Employees Association and current candidate for CalPERS' Board of Administration (he also works for the fund).
A few key sentences from Jelincic's column:
The Bee's support of pay and benefit cuts and layoffs for public employees as a solution to the current budget crisis might make some sense if there was a decline in the demand for public services. Unfortunately, quite the opposite is true - the demand for public services has never been higher. Even The Bee has editorialized against cuts in services.
You can't have it both ways: cutting pay and benefits, and laying off workers while expecting services to be maintained. But apparently that's exactly what The Bee and our legislators expect.
Click here to read the entire piece. And click here for an earlier Jelincic op-ed from December, "Another view: Schwarzenegger's furlough plan is fiscally shortsighted."
UPDATE 3:50 p.m.: Bee colleagues Dale Kasler and Darrell Smith have a report on today's fiber front and online home pages on the local impact of state government furloughs and layoffs:
Between furloughs and layoffs, the state's budget crisis could cost Sacramento's beleaguered economy more than a half-billion dollars in the next year.
Click here for that story.
And on a related note, we're looking for state workers who have been hard hit by furloughs. We'd like to tell your story. We often receive e-mails from California civil servants who say that they're facing home foreclosures or bankruptcy, but none has been willing to tell their story on the record.
That's understandable, but to report this we need people with the courage to be public about their problems. Call or e-mail if that's you -- (916)321-1043 or jortiz@sacbee.com.
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