Prince George’s County: $57 Million in the Hole
September 15th, 2008 by Kenneth Burns
Prince George’s County Executive Jack Johnson (D) is staring down a $75 million hole, $57 million of it is for 2009. He recently submitted a proposal to the county council to address this shortfall through an employee furlough plan, which would call on full-time general fund employees to take 80 hours of leave without pay by June of next year.
Johnson entered negotiations with county labor unions to reduction a planned pay hike to 3.5 percent instead of the 6-8 percent. The union rejected the plan so the county will have to implement furloughs, a process Johnson called unnecessary.”
“Although we have taken aggressive steps to address our budget deficit, in order to close this gap we must initiate an across-the-board furlough plan,” Johnson said. “Furloughs should have been unnecessary. I worked very hard trying to reduce the 6 to 8 percent county employee salary increases to 3.5 percent, but the union leadership refused and furloughs were unavoidable.”
Deb Says
Jack Johnson is very misleading in his comment about the unions refusing to give up the 6-8% raise previously negotiated. Those numbers are derived from adding together this year’s 2% COLA with an agreed upon additional 2% for the next fiscal year. Then add the customary 1.5 to 2% merit increases that most employees get at their anniversary. Using this math, I should be more than satisfied as I am making more than 400% more than I did when I started there over 20 years ago. Maybe its this skewed math that caused the $57 million shortfall???
Sep 20th, 2008 at 9:33 am