[This is a continuation of yesterday’s notes of a discussion with several very knowledgeable sources at the State Capitol held on a “not for attribution” basis.
To clarify–they agreed to take “on the record” questions after providing an overview of the issues, but once there it seemed to me that airing their more candid comments would be most useful to readers at this point in time. So maintaining the “not for attribution” basis was my own call and not something they insisted on.]
From a “big picture” perspective, the feeling in the room was that under the cover of this fiscal emergency, Gov. Lingle’s administration is pursuing a fundamentally conservative strategy of privatization, by undermining the civil service system through layoffs while contracting out, often at significantly higher cost, for legally mandated services, favoring mainland for-profit companies over local nonprofit service providers, and eliminating regulation by laying off the regulators.
One example is in the area of public health nursing, including providing nursing services in schools, for special ed students, and other populations. Although these services are required by law, the administration is cutting regular civil service positions and putting additional money into a private nursing services contract to replace people who will be or have been laid off.
“The worst part is that it’s going to cost us more, a whole lot more,” one of the participants said.
They ticked off other areas of state government where required services are being marked for elimination–vector control (think rats, flies, mosquitoes, ticks, and other disease carriers), agricultural inspection, clean air and water monitors, early intervention services, etc.
In many case, they said the state has given assurances that the functions are not being eliminated while cutting the people who do these jobs.
So, you’re going to eliminate the people who are most experienced and most likely to do the job well, and going to replace them with, who? We don’t know….They say the function will continue, but they can’t tell you…they’re cutting people, but these are the people who do the job. I don’t know how they’re going to do the job going forward.”
“It’s really like this slash and burn at the worst possible time,” another commented.
Another example pointed to is the dismantling of parts of the Information and Communication Services Division in the Department of Accounting and General Services.
ICSC is “responsible for comprehensively managing the information processing and telecommunication systems in order to provide services to all agencies of the State of Hawaii.”
But while cutting back the IT functions of ICSD, the state has proceeded to issue several large contracts to private companies for a “data warehouse” system.
Although the Lingle administration is not releasing funds from the tobacco settlement for the Healthy Start program, they’re spending money from the same tobacco settlement on the data warehouse project, one of the legislators said.
With President Obama pushing a national reorganization and restructuring of computerized health information services, and the private sector expressing keen interest in this initiative, these legislators wondered why we’re spending state dollars in large amounts at this time while simultaneously eliminating key health services.
“The public health function of the data is very insignificant compared to the providing of care and the insurance aspects. So if you facilitate the private sector guys accelerating their activities, you would get the state benefit off the back end because they’re going to collect the data at the point of delivering services,” one legislator explained.
This is really a pattern in this administration,” one said. “They don’t like the local companies, they try to bring in outside for-profit companies. We saw it with Summerlin in terms of health insurance, we’ve seen it in other areas where they’ve bent over backwards to write the contracts in such a way a for-profit company on the mainland can do it cheaper than a local company that is having to deal with all the other precurement and tax and other issues.”
They also complained that the state procurement office has taken cuts and lost positions.
“So in this decentralized model, where departments are able to do their own procurements, it’s almost like taking the procurement office out of the loop, maybe as one consequence of that highly publicized hydogen fund investigation. Now, a year and a half later, the SPO is not doing as many of the direct procurement oversight as it used to. So its kind of, all across the board, an assault.”
One of the legislators had this very blunt assessment:
People on the layoff list are the people who would provide the regulatory function of corporate safety and all that kind of stuff, in various capacities. They’re getting the pink slips and they’re getting wiped out.
In the meantime, they’re contracting with for-profit guys and there’s nobody left inthe system to verify that the guy is doing the job that he said he would be doing in the way that he said. And at the end of the day, the consumer is left holding the bag because they’re supposed to be getting services, may or may not be, and there’s nobody to identify if they are or they aren’t because all those guys are gone.
Several referred to anecdotal evidence that layoffs have targeted union stewards and older workers, among others. They cite scattered reports of supervisors being directed to make up lists of stewards and those employees closest to retirement, with many of those same employees later getting layoff notices.
Of course, targeting older workers would raise issues of age discrimination, but, they say, unions are swamped with complaints and lack the resources to respond to all of the requests for assistance.
But in the midst of layoff notices and upcoming furloughs, the state is still hiring.
In some cases, these legislators say, civil service employees are on the layoff list in order to protect other “exempt” employees in the same departments.
Normally you would reduce your exempt and noncivil service staff first, and then civil service, and then you have bumping rights and other protections in place. And in this go around, it’s the exact opposite. Civil Service staff are the most on the chopping block, and there seems to be exempts still being hired, there are still recruitments going on, I think you look at some of the labor employeement recruitment web sites, there still are positions they’re still processing. Then you’ve got this contracts category, where the departments are doing a lot of conversion of what were previously government employee types of positions into services that are now being provided by contract.
“So it’s almost like they’re dismantling civil service,” one concluded.
