Thursday, October 30, 2008

Changes for Cheshire staffing levels?

From the Courant's Don Stacom:

Many local governments have reduced hiring, frozen overtime and pushed off big construction jobs as the effects of the late-summer national financial crisis hit their budgets. Chronically troubled big cities with meager fiscal reserves have declared layoffs — 56 in Hartford, 34 in New Haven and 28 in Bridgeport.

Personally, I hope Cheshire's implements a hiring freeze. If we don't, are we looking at hiring someone today who will be laid off in six months? I think it's best to just slow down... at least until the election is over and the legislature has had some time decide where to cut spending... or raise taxes. And since they're scheduled to meet in mid-November... I think we should just sit tight for at least a few weeks.

What I found really interesting in the article was at the end:

"That's the larger, looming issue," (Manchester General Manager Scott) Shanley said. "This is not a problem that looks like it will go away in the next year or two. I've been through what we might call sharp downturns before, but what's different this time is that we never really recovered from [20]01-'02. We've been cutting and tightening since then."

Manchester is different from Cheshire. Here are the staffing numbers for Cheshire for the ten years up to our most recently completed audit of June 30, 2007:
Tim White

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Seems like the 2007 number of 213.52 full time equivalents is low by about 300 or so. Adding in the BOE and teachers probably raises the number of FTEs to something like 500+ town employees.

Could it really be that there are only ~50 town residents for each of the 500 or so FTE's employed by our town?

What is the average cost of salary, benefits, and pension expense per FTE per year? And what is the average contribution per town resident for each FTE?

Anonymous said...

You can only add teachers if you know how many we have... does anyone know?

I should post that spreadsheet from my pre-blogging days. I bet you'd appreciate it.

Anonymous said...

TW- -

It is recognized that if the numbers are not readily available that you can’t easily put them in. However one can make some pretty good guesses for starters. The BOE hasn’t yet figured out that maybe they should also work hard to hide the names of the schools in town which they control and what grade levels each contains. Just wait - - -

I guess the other issue might be the concept of FTE. Public Works FTE’s may no doubt be less then happy finding out that a PW FTE has to be accountable maybe 48 of 50 weeks a year not including vacation time while a BOE teacher FTE kind of maybe gets a full years worth of pay checks in something like 10 equal installments, no summer time pay checks - - at least that’s how it’s done in places like North Carolina - - -

Anonymous said...

I heard enrollment is down and staffing is up. Doesn't make sense.

Will staffing go down when enrollment goes up?

Anonymous said...

I heard Florio say as this school year started that there are over 700 school employees.