It is infuriating.
If we individuals behaved as the state does agreed to pay a certain amount for services rendered, then simply didn't do it - at minimum we¹d be taken to court. Depending on what obligation we were ignoring, and for how long, we might even go to jail.
During the last two weeks of July, UMass employees experienced whiplash. First the legislature passed a budget that accepted our contracts negotiated more than a year ago. But there was a catch: while that budget included funds to pay, retroactively, the raises due employees between July 2001 and July 2002, there were no increases in the overall budget to pay for the raises due to take effect now or next July.
According to Stan Rosenberg, the overall effect of the legislature's action could have been 500-600 layoffs at UMass Amherst. He used these numbers: an $11+ million explicit cut in the budget from the previous year's budget, plus approximately $37 million that the University would have to find in its reduced budget to pay the raises called for in the contract for the new fiscal year - a contract which the legislature"³approved" but did not fund. Add those together and you get over one tenth of the University's whole state appropriation.
Just as members of my Union (SEIU Local 509) were beginning to discuss what we thought the unions should do (various positions included: "raises for some shouldn't come at the expense of layoffs for others," versus "the integrity of the contract," versus "those aren't the only choices - they should raise enough revenue to honor their commitments") the Acting Governor swept in like a deus ex machina and vetoed the whole thing. She did this even though she had endorsed the contract a year ago last August and submitted it to the legislature for their approval. While she was at it, she also vetoed another $34 million out of higher education's budget. We hear the University President's Office quietly supported those vetoes; what most legislators thought we never got to find out, since they didn't get to vote whether to override the vetoes.
Presumably we no longer face so many layoffs, but we wait to see who among us does get cut.
How did we get in this mess? Remember the referendum question to "roll back" the income tax? Believe it or not, that vote took place less than two years ago, in November of 2000, when a rising stock market seemed permanent to a lot of people. Even government officials who are responsible for our common wealth assumed the market could only go up. Our tax revenue was just as dependent on that stock market bubble as individual portfolios: most of the revenue creating the state's "surplus" came from taxes on capital gains. The supposedly extra dollars in the "surplus" were just too tempting for the majority of the voters, who said "yes!" to a cut in their taxes. People didn't want to hear the facts: the reduction in taxes would cripple state government even if the overall economy stayed strong. That fall I was one of the Union activists phoning voters to urge them to vote "no," and I distinctly remember the surprising number of negative reactions I got, even though everyone I called was a state employee. The dire predictions were correct. To make matters far worse, when the bubble burst, the revenues plummeted, and they haven't stopped falling yet. Those precautions that had been taken, such as setting up the largest "rainy day fund" the state has ever had, turned out to be inadequate for the deluge we are experiencing. If you sense an "I told you so" here, you're right. And I'll add another: I had been pushing throughout the late 1990s for the state to use its "surplus" for projects we citizens could see, use and benefit from, especially repairs. I focussed primarily on the University and the Forests and Parks, the two aspects of state government I knew best, but I recognized other agencies also had huge backlogs of "deferred maintenance" that needed tending to. Bridges and buildings were falling down all over the place; my argument was "let's fix the roof while we have the money." The state did a little of that, but not much. Mostly, repair projects were "bonded," which means we borrowed money we now have to pay back, with interest, to do work that could have been paid for with cash on hand. Can someone enlighten me why people who propose this kind of financing get to be called "fiscal conservatives"? If the state had spent that money wisely, people probably wouldn't have voted for the tax cut. It's hard not to see a conspiracy here.
As usual, the people who did the most to create this mess aren't paying the heaviest price for it. Generally, the people with the least clout get the biggest cuts. In the case of the raises, it was more like musical chairs: all the other state employee contracts got funded long ago, and we were the ones left standing without a place to sit. Beyond our immediate concern, there's the question what effect the abrogation of an agreed-upon and ratified contract will have in the future. I bet the state will eventually have to pay the money due for raises in contracts; but that doesn't help the people who retire, leave, or get laid off in the meantime. Or the destruction of confidence in the process. It has made a bad situation even worse.