That big savings that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger estimated taxpayers would get by furloughing state workers - wait for it - could amount to nothing at all. At the most, it's a short-term benefit to balance the books.
Jon Ortiz and Phillip Reese at the Sacramento Bee pulled together data from the state Controller's office and found that furloughs "have pushed many state workers to sock away time, producing a larger state liability at a higher eventual price." Here's what they found:
The number of vacation hours used by state employees fell 31 percent from 2008 to 2009, according to a Bee analysis of state controller data. Government workers used 58 percent of the vacation time they accrued during 2009, down from 86 percent a year earlier. ...
'All that (the state) did with furloughs was borrow money," said Marcia Fritz, a Citrus Heights accountant and a former CalPERS consultant who advocates for less lucrative public pensions. 'They didn't reduce cost. They just closed a cash-flow gap.'
When state employees don't use up vacation days, they're allowed to "bank" those days and get paid for them when they leave state service. It's a benefit they're entitled to receive, just like at most private jobs. Here's the extra cost: The state pays for that vacation day at whatever salary the state employee is receiving when they retire; a vacation day in 2010 could cost the state much more in 2020.
In February 2008, more than 200,000 state employees were ordered to take furlough days at least twice a month. A third day was added last summer. Each furlough day cost state employees 5 percent of their pay.
With all the extra time off, they've been using fewer vacation days.
California Watch found recently that nearly 500 government workers had earned six-figure paychecks when they leave state service, mostly for unused vacation. In total, the state spent $486 million between 2006 and mid-2009 to pay more than 52,000 employees for time-off benefits – which includes a small percentage of unused comp time and holidays that weren’t taken.
Many of those cash payments appeared to violate rules designed to limit how much vacation time state workers can accumulate during their careers. Most employees are allowed to bank 80 days worth of unused vacation, but records show that supervisors routinely allow them to exceed that amount.
Our report also identified a number of employees who had accumulated large amounts of comp time in addition to unused vacation days. One employee took home $815,000 when he left state service.
The payout for Kim Nguyen, a former doctor at the prison substance abuse facility in Corcoran, includes more than twice the allowable amount of vacation time and nearly 10 times the limit of comp time for physicians, records show.
“They never hired enough doctors,” said Nguyen, who was featured in a 2008 San Jose Mercury News story that also identified large vacation payouts to state workers. “I never complained so they thought we could handle it. … They kept asking us to work more.”
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