The state's budget crisis is real and immediate. Its needed remedies will inevitably have damaging effects on state services and programs, but those effects should be minimized to the extent possible.
The task of the governor and the General Assembly is to eliminate $3.5 billion to $4 billion in expenditures from a budget of about $19 billion, beginning July 1. The only available source of funds of that scale is state government payroll outlay.
To dismiss enough employees to reduce the salary outlay for 2011-12 by $4 billion would wreak havoc on services and programs on a scale that would take a decade or more to overcome, once the economy rebounds. There would be countless charges of unfairness in selecting employees to be dismissed. Some dismissals undoubtedly would be judicially challenged and thus could be made effective long after July 1. Other negative impacts are obvious.
I propose in the alternative that the governor order the reduction of all state employees' state salaries not constitutionally immune by a percentage sufficient to produce a total saving of $4 billion in 2011-12. No furloughs are intended; employees would be expected to maintain their current work schedules despite pay reductions.
That pay cut should be effective July 1 and should be continued, year by year, as long as necessary. The budget to be recommended by the governor to the General Assembly should embody that cut.
The governor should follow the 1929 example of Gov. O. Max Gardner and reduce her own salary by the same percentage as state employees generally. She should challenge the state officers whose salaries are constitutionally protected from reduction during term (Council of State members, all judges and members of the General Assembly) to follow her example.
These actions are precedented by several such across-the-board pay cuts of as much as one-third during the early 1930s.
That approach, in contrast to the suggested personnel dismissals, would have the effect of spreading the sacrifice evenly over the state workforce, while leaving programs and services less impaired than would wholesale dismissals. It would also be capable of adjustment, up or down, as financial circumstances might warrant in the future. And it could be terminated when the financial crisis passes, as it will.
There would be cries of pain from many of those affected and their advocates, no doubt. But they would be less poignant than the complaints that would come from thousands of dismissed state employees.
John L. Sanders
Chapel Hill
The writer is professor of public law and government, emeritus, at UNC-Chapel Hill. The length limit on letters was waived.
