Gov. Martin O?Malley ordered his Cabinet secretaries Thursday morning to do one thing ? cut.
Cut state spending by $200 million this year and cut another $125 million from the fiscal 2008 budget just passed by the General Assembly, about 2.5 percent of their budgets.
O?Malley also wants to cut overtime by state employees, which came to more than $125 million last year. The short-staffed corrections department, which runs state prisons, reported more than $38 million in overtime.
In a statement, O?Malley called the cuts “an initial step in closing the $1.4 billion deficit that the state faces next year.”
“We need agencies to refocus on their core mission, thin out middle management and squeeze spending by working smarter,” O?Malley said.
Cutting overtime use is going to be a major focus of the StateStat process to measure government performance. In the case of the Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services, a quarter of its employees ? mostly correctional officers ? make more than 20 percent of their annual salaries from overtime.
“We?ve never really tracked overtime in state government in a systematic, across-the-board way that we will be now to identify the variances,” O?Malley said.
Legislative budget experts have said that O?Malley would find it difficult to make more cuts in agencies that were already cut back by then-Gov. Robert Ehrlich. But O?Malley is seeking to cut staff, especially communications employees, and limit travel expenses. He also wants to centralize operations that are duplicated, increase energy conservation and consolidate redundant boards, task forces and commissions.
O?Malley gave what is now the standard explanation for the source of the structural deficit: a 10 percent cut in income tax rates that cost $1 billion and increases in state spending on public schools that amounted to more than $1.3 billion in so-called Thornton aid.
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
