Rendell: only 100 layoffs necessary in Harrisburg

It’s a far cry from the 20,000 layoffs he had thought would be required. Even recently, he said at least 700 people would lose jobs.

Governor Ed Rendell began the summer by warning of a budget “Armageddon,” with up to 20,000 Pennsylvania employee layoffs.
He now says only one hundred public workers will lose their jobs due to budget cuts.

In order to fill a federal funding shortfall, Rendell has trimmed an additional 1.9 percent from state department budgets.

Even with the new cuts, Rendell says the amount of laid off state workers will be far below his earlier predictions. That’s mostly due to an unusual amount of employee retirements, as well as a hiring freeze.

“Because our agencies are willing to not fill those filled positions, the good news is that we’ll probably only have to issue approximately a hundred layoff notices. Don’t know where they are yet, what departments they’re from. The secretaries will be working on that.”

The governor had warned of 20,000 layoffs, if Congress didn’t approve a federal funding bill. He later scaled that figure back to 12,000. Even with full federal assistance, Rendell had said a thousand workers would be let go, due to this year’s state cuts. The figure was later revised to 700, and now, about one hundred.