We all know the sad story when it comes to government budgets. As the federal government gives less money to the states, the states give less to the counties and cities in the area. To compound the problems these local governments are getting less revenue in the form of taxes, since fewer people working and buying means less taxes on the whole. This means that there is less money to work with, and when those cuts need to be made they most of the areas turn to the fastest way to make line item cuts, they turn to laying off workers.

That is the case for the county of St. Louis, as they are getting ready to make what are being termed as significant layoffs in order to fix a whole in their budget. The layoffs are expected to affect about two dozen workers in the parks department and public works department. While those may not sound significant it is important to know that these are not the only changes to the staffing in the county.

St. Louis County is getting ready to cut back on some of their recreation services. Two of the parks in the county are on tap to be closed, and if that happens there will be a loss of  about 175 more jobs from the payroll. The county is also going to close three of its pools earlier this summer.

In addition some of the cost savings will come not from job cuts, but from attrition. This county parks department will leave about 25 positions unfilled in order to help shore up the holes in the budget that they have to deal with. They are currently facing a deficit of about $3.6 million, which needs to be cut from the parks department budget.
At the current moment we have no word as to when those affected by the layoffs will be notified, and what kind of severance or union benefits that they may be entitled to when they are let go.  For now all that the workers of the parks and recreation department can do is hope that the count management finds other ways to cut back on the budget, without cutting down more than 100 jobs.

St. Louis is, as you can imagine is not the only county to need to cut back on jobs in order to keep their budgets balanced and they are not even one of the more extreme cases. For those of you who missed our earlier coverage, here is an excerpt :

“Job cuts have come to the County of Miami-Dade and on Friday a great number of employees were giving them their walking papers, with the rest to be done by the end of the week. The layoffs are coming to 118 members of the police force as well as to the 282 other workers who were employed by the county….

The job cuts came to the workers after the county commissioners rejected a plan that was put forth by the mayor. The plan was a bit controversial, because it would have staved off layoffs by significantly increasing the costs of health care for all workers. Since many of those workers are members of two unions the plan was not popular.

While no action has been taken at this time the police union has been dropping hints that some kind of legal action may be taken in the future, regarding the layoffs. We will have to wait and see if anything happens or if this is just more political posturing in order to prevent more layoffs in the future.”