You say tomato. I say tomahto. What the governor calls efficiency in state government, a labor union calls a crisis in staff erosion.
Gov. Rod Blagojevich has trimmed the state's payroll by 13,000 positions since taking office nearly four years ago. Now running for a second term, he is being criticized for this by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Council 31. The union, which represents 35,000 state workers, is challenging Blagojevich's tactic of reducing — by its count — front-line staff by 7,000. The hardest hit have been two of the largest agencies, the Illinois Department of Corrections and the Illinois Department of Human Services.
In a series of nine reports, Council 31 also drew direct relationships between staff shortages and inadequacies in agencies' ability to care for veterans, investigate child abuse, issue food stamps, monitor water quality, process DNA samples for criminal cases and provide personalized care for people with disabilities.
As usual, the math used by all parties has been fuzzy. What became crystal clear this spring, however, was that the state's budget has no extra money to rehire thousands of workers.
More important, the missing variable — and what policymakers have failed to solve in this multi-year debate — is the number of employees needed to run efficient and effective services.
The governor's administration says staff cuts have saved millions of dollars, and that amount will compound each year. Savings from attrition and consolidation totaled $811 million in fiscal year 2005, $900 million in '06 and a projected $1 billion in '07, says Becky Carroll, spokeswoman for the governor's budget office.
While trimming the payroll requires some agencies to do more with less, Carroll says reducing head count is the governor's strategy for fundamentally changing the way government is run. She says the strategy has replaced administrative positions with more front-line workers, stretching taxpayer dollars and avoiding cuts in health care or education.
"That has enabled this governor to avoid having to increase the sales or income tax or make dramatic layoffs in order to meet the state's needs," she says.
AFSCME, on the other hand, believes rehiring much-needed workers could save the state money by reducing overtime costs, said Council 31's executive director, Henry Bayer, at a press conference last month.
"The Department of Human Services, facilities for the mentally ill and for the developmentally disabled, last year alone there was over a million hours of overtime paid at time-and-a-half. That's enough to fund over 700 jobs," he said. "At the Department of Corrections, we had $22-million's worth of overtime last year. A lot of that is due to the staffing shortages. A lot of that overtime could be cut."
As usual, the math used by all parties has been fuzzy. What became crystal clear this spring, however, was that the state's budget has no extra money to rehire thousands of workers.
Carroll disagrees. She says rehiring 600 corrections employees wouldn't save the state $22 million. "What they failed to mention is that would actually add $23 million in additional personnel costs. They're not taking into consideration that there are salaries, and pensions and health care costs that come with each and every employee that you hire."
This back-and-forth volley of facts has caught the attention of state legislators.
Council 31's Bayer was joined by Independent Sen. James Meeks of Chicago. Contention over staff cuts has led them to back Meeks as a potential candidate for governor, contesting Blagojevich, a Democrat, and state Treasurer Judy Baar Topinka, a Republican.
Meeks joined the union's efforts and called on lawmakers to approve a budget that would replenish 2,000 front-line staff, predominantly in corrections and human services. The press conference, like many others in Council 31's campaign, used anecdotes from agency employees as evidence of the immediate need.
Ken Kleinlein, a local union leader and supply supervisor at the Western Illinois Correctional Center in Mount Sterling, shared his account. He cited an alleged rape of a dietary manager at Jacksonville Correctional Center, an inmate killed by another inmate at Big Muddy River Correctional Center in Jefferson County a few weeks later, and an inmate who was stabbed 22 times at his own facility about two years ago. "We don't have the amount of staff that we need for our own protection or for protection of our inmate population," he said. "And unless something happens, there's going to be more of these stories."
Whether hiring hundreds more staff would deter violence, however, is the crux of the debate. Members of the governor's administration say there's a loose connection between overtime, staffing levels and violence in prisons.
Bill Edley, chief of administration for the corrections department, testified to a Senate committee in March that there were 3,000 fewer corrections employees in 2005 than in 2001. Yet, in those four years, assaults on staff dropped by 50 percent, from 942 to 489.
Anders Lindall, spokesman for Council 31, says, "We're very skeptical about the accuracy of those statistics." In the report about prison safety, titled, "Maximum Insecurity," the union says the department would not provide data. The union's own research shows injuries to inmates and staff have increased with fewer guards on duty and more guards working overtime.
In response to what administration officials say is a demonstrated need, the corrections department is already looking to restore 250 positions with next year's budget. About 76 legislators side with Council 31 and say that's not nearly enough.
Sen. Deanna Demuzio, a Democrat from Carlinville, has six prisons in her district, which stretches from the Missouri border to central Illinois. She sponsored legislation this spring to restore staff. The proposal also calls on Illinois Auditor General William Holland to study whether state agencies adequately perform services and ensure safety with existing staff levels.
Demuzio's measure sailed through the Senate, but it was never called in the House. She says, while she didn't expect to get all 2,000 positions restored, anything would be better than nothing.
What is still unknown is the way in which staff levels affect the people served by each agency.
The number of nurses, technicians and doctors needed at a state-operated mental health facility, for instance, depends on the type of patients, whether they were committed by the justice system or entered the hospital on their own.
Tom Green, a spokesman for the Department of Human Services, says while the ratio of front-line staff for every client has increased at developmental centers, the ratio has taken a slight dip at mental health hospitals. Yet that dip reflects a lower number of patients who need higher levels of care.
One law professor says determining the appropriate number of people to staff a psychiatric hospital is similar to the logic in staffing an intensive care unit. The more severe the injury, the more staff is needed to care for the patient, says Mark Heyrman, a clinical law professor at the University of Chicago Law School.
Heyrman also chairs the public policy committee of the Mental Health Association in Illinois and was cited by Council 31 as an independent source. He says he has no affiliation with AFSCME.
He says the definition of patients who need hospitalization has narrowed in the last decade. "We used to have 55,000 state psych beds. Now we have 1,400," he says. "No one thinks we should go back to 55,000.
Whether 1,400 is the right number or not is a contentious issue, but everyone agrees that because there are 1,400, the people are sicker."
In turn, he says the number of qualified workers needed to run a psychiatric hospital today is higher than it was five years ago.
Heyrman says more staff also might be needed today because the lower number of beds means higher turnover in patient admissions and discharges, which are more labor-intensive. They require staff to become familiar with each patient's individual needs, and quicker. Then staff has to funnel all the paperwork to make way for the next patient. "The more people coming and going, the more staff you need," Heyrman says.
Two signs that a mental health hospital has too few workers, he says, are an increase in incidence reports and an increase in patients needing additional trips to the hospital.
"One of the things with mental illness is having human connection and then maintaining that connection," Heyrman says. "That relates to staff having enough time to spend with patients and understanding them, particularly to get to the bottom of what went wrong. You're talking about finding ways that people with chronic, treatable but often incurable diseases, get connected to the system and stay connected."
Given the election-year glare on the number of state workers, it may be time for policymakers to balance that equation, which would require concrete math and consideration of ways the numbers affect human beings.
Bethany Carson can be reached at capitolbureau@aol.com.
Illinois Issues, May 2006
