Juneau has lost more state jobs over the past two years than any other place in Alaska, the director of the state office of management and budget told lawmakers Monday.<\/p>\n
Pat Pitney, as part of a presentation to the Senate Finance Committee, provided figures showing Juneau lost 198 state jobs between Dec. 31, 2014 and Nov. 15, 2015. Anchorage, which has approximately twice the number of state jobs as Juneau, lost 193 positions.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s more than Anchorage, but not considerably more,\u201d Pitney said after the conclusion of the meeting.<\/p>\n
The jobs data was released as Pitney was interrogated by members of the Senate curious whether the state is simply cutting people while leaving their positions vacant. Sen. Anna MacKinnon, R-Anchorage and co-chairwoman of the finance committee, said she doesn\u2019t feel it\u2019s a true budget cut unless a position is eliminated, not just left vacant.<\/p>\n
Sen. Pete Kelly, R-Fairbanks and co-chairman of the committee, said he agrees, then compared the situation to a human being\u2019s fat cells. When a person loses weight, he explained, the fat cells empty out but don\u2019t entirely go away. If a person eats too much, even after losing weight, those fat cells can fill back up.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re trying to get rid of these fat cells,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIs the state losing weight, or are we just performing liposuction?\u201d Sen. Mike Dunleavy, R-Wasilla, asked.<\/p>\n
Pitney replied that the state lost about 600 employees between 2014 and 2015. One-third of those cuts were in Juneau.<\/p>\n
Figures provided by Pitney from Department of Labor seasonally adjusted data show that the state had 24,800 employees in October 2015. That\u2019s the lowest figure since October 2007, when the state employed 24,700 people. According to DOL figures, the state peaked at 27,200 employees in January 2011.<\/p>\n
That didn\u2019t appear to satisfy lawmakers, who wanted to know if the state was eliminating people, or positions and people.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat I\u2019m looking for is how the position counts affect, long-term, the number of employees,\u201d MacKinnon said.<\/p>\n
With the state\u2019s annual deficit now approaching $4 billion per year, she said she wants to make sure that cuts today won\u2019t simply be filled tomorrow.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re looking at going forward, and it doesn\u2019t look like this administration is cutting the budget,\u201d she told Pitney after the meeting\u2019s conclusion. \u201cFrom our position, we\u2019re trying to see how we sustain a budget that is $4 billion short.\u201d<\/p>\n
During the hearing, MacKinnon asked Pitney to provide a list of Position Control Numbers, the IDs by which the state designates each available position, even if it is unfilled.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re going to go into your budget,\u201d MacKinnon told Pitney after the hearing, referring to the governor\u2019s proposed budget, \u201cand if it\u2019s not gone, we\u2019re going to delete it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Juneau has lost more state jobs over the past two years than any other place in Alaska, the director of the state office of management and budget told lawmakers Monday. Pat Pitney, as part of a presentation to the Senate Finance Committee, provided figures showing Juneau lost 198 state jobs between Dec. 31, 2014 and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":426,"featured_media":11385,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[230],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-11384","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-state-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11384","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/426"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11384"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11384\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11385"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11384"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11384"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11384"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=11384"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}