The Daily Campus

Issue date: 1/27/09 Section: Commentary

The latest proposals by President Hogan and Gov. Rell to save money in the Connecticut state government budget are sound. Hogan has asked university management to volunteer a day's worth of pay back to the university, while Rell has asked state government managers and commissioners to voluntarily take a day of unpaid leave. The idea is to cut current employee pay without having to wrangle through bureaucratic salary negotiations, and in turn avoid future layoffs. With the state budget for this nascent financial year already facing a $353 million dollar deficit, all state employees are going to have to share some pain.

Of course, no exact projections of cost savings were offered for these two plans (estimates have been in the $1 million range); being that the proposals are strictly voluntary, it is sensible that making an exact projection would be difficult, though official and social pressures will hopefully ensure a fairly high participation rate among the targeted employees. And while the proposals are voluntary, one can be sure that a manger's participation - or lack thereof - in the Hogan or Rell schemes will be duly noted by the proper, raise-and-promotion-dispensing powers that be.

Nonetheless, it is certain that the plan won't save $353 million - or save even as much as the sum of the salaries of the 824 full-time employees added to the Connecticut state payrolls during last year's "hiring freeze."

The plans also leave out broad swaths of state workers, namely unionized employees - such as UConn's professors - who are apparently ineligible for volunteering a day of unpaid labor. Essentially, the "Day On" is mostly a public-relations maneuver. It doesn't target many of the highest paid of UConn's employees - such as athletic coaches - and it won't really stop any of the gaps in our state's leaking budget. Nonetheless, in these difficult times, perhaps it is not such a bad idea to enact a publicity stunt to raise awareness of the true extent of the difficulties facing the state. Connecticut is in a particularly tight spot, being that the epicenter of the recent meltdown - banks, hedge firms and their ilk - forms such an important component of state tax revenue. Hopefully this proposal will pave the way for more efficacious cost-saving measures to bridge the looming deficit gap. With any luck, an undue number of layoffs can be avoided as the state system hunkers down, waiting for the restoration of the good times of financial-industry tax returns.

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