The Board of Public Works is expected Wednesday to eliminate 500 state jobs in this year?s budget ? the positions the General Assembly told the governor to abolish during the special session of the legislature. No state employee will actually be out of work, because all the positions are vacant, many for more than a year.
In next year?s budget Gov. Martin O?Malley submitted two weeks ago, he proposed spending for 976 new positions. Yet there are already 5,000 vacant positions in state government waiting to be filled. What?s up with the jobs?
What are being abolished are PINs ? position identification numbers attached to specific jobs in specific agencies. There are about 86,000 positionsauthorized in state agencies, including higher education.
At any point in time, at least 5 percent of these positions are not filled. This is what legislative analysts call the “turnover rate” ? positions that exist but aren?t filled, and the money is not actually put in the budget to fund them. In fact, one chart calls these “necessary vacancies.”
Then there are the PINs that are funded but unfilled. The Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services has the largest number of those ? 587 positions out of total of 1,152 vacancies, most hard-to-fill jobs as correctional officers. Yet the governor is asking for 156 new positions to staff the final two housing units at the North Branch Correctional Institution in Cumberland ? new PINs for a new location.
“The legislature has been asking governors to recycle the positions that are already there,” said Warren Deschenaux, the legislature?s chief fiscal analyst.
Many of the positions the governor has asked for “may or not get filled,” Deschenaux said. The budget analysts who work under him already have started making recommendations to legislators for positions to be cut.
O?Malley might not even agree with the 158 new positions in the judiciary, but under the constitution, he simply passes the judicial request to the General Assembly. “We?ll have some recommendations on those,” Deschenaux told a joint meeting of appropriators, who laughed knowingly at the likely recommended cuts.
However, the prison jobs are “politically sensitive,” Deschenaux said. “No one wants to be accused of understaffing correctional institutions.”
