Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell said Tuesday that, given the rough economy, one-time bonuses state employees are slated to receive this week will be the only salary bump they’ll see in the near future. State employees, who have gone without any increase in pay since November 2007, will get a one-time 3 percent bonus this week as a reward for finding millions of dollars in savings in the state budget, McDonnell said on his monthly appearance on WTOP’s “Ask the Governor.”
“What I want to do is create a system so that we don’t have that massive spending at the end of the fiscal year,” he said. “We cut $10 billion out of the budget; they saved another $175 million on top of that mark, and so that’s why the bonus was paid, out of savings generated by our state employees.”
But, McDonnell added, state workers are unlikely to see any pay raises soon.
“I’m going to continue to do everything I can to take care of state employees,” the governor said, “but I don’t see the raise happening, at least in the near term.”
One caller, identifying herself as a George Mason University professor, pressed the governor on why there would be no pay raises for state employees.
“The situation is still tough in Virginia’s economy,” McDonnell said. “We have got so many unfunded liabilities in our system — we’ve got unfunded mandates from the federal government, we’ve got Medicaid and other expenses that are growing at astronomical rates, we’ve got to invest more in places like higher education which we have underfunded, and job creation, economic development.”
McDonnell also weighed in on President Obama’s announcement to freeze salaries for 2 million civilian federal employees for two years, saying it was a prudent step toward reining in what the governor called an “immoral and unsustainable” level of federal spending and debt.
“It’s a good start, but they [have] to do a whole lot more than that if they want to get this budget deficit under control and restore fiscal responsibility in Washington,” he said.
