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Government Hiring
Government Keeps Hiring
Finding ways to grow: Government keeps hiring as the private sector in Florida trimmed more than 100,000 jobs in a year.
In addition to education, Rust says, hospitals, courts, correctional facilities and law-enforcement agencies are among the government areas still adding jobs in Florida. But she doesn’t necessarily expect the growth to hold. State and local revenues have declined with Florida’s housing market. Florida economists don’t expect a rebound until the 2010-11 fiscal year. Florida lawmakers had to shrink this year’s budget by $4 billion and now face another $4 billion hole next year. The first step in trimming is often to eliminate all vacant positions and cut work hours, Rust says — actions already taken across the state that don’t result in a statistical loss.
The next step: Layoffs — or maybe not. Consider these two cases:
- Pinellas Sheriff Jim Coats, who warned taxpayers last spring that the streets would be “littered with human carnage” if he had to cut his budget by 10%, made the cut and eliminated 161 positions, 25 of those deputies. But Hillsborough Sheriff David Gee had a deputy shortage, so he snapped up every laid-off Pinellas cop who wanted to come. “I don’t think they had to miss a day’s pay,” says Coats. Meanwhile, there are few signs of human carnage on Pinellas streets, although Coats says the non-violent crime rate is up slightly in the areas covered by his agency.
- In Gainesville, which had the third-highest government-sector growth in the state, at 2.7%, officials with University of Florida-affiliated Shands HealthCare recently announced plans to shutter an entire hospital. Shands AGH, Gainesville’s longtime community hospital, employs 1,150. Shands HealthCare CEO Tim Goldfarb says he must cut a total $65 million from the system’s budget in the next three years to offset anticipated shortfalls in federal and state funding and insurance reimbursement. Shands will close 80-year-old AGH next fall, about the time it opens a $385-million cancer hospital on campus expected to create 1,200 jobs. In fact, Goldfarb says, “We believe we can find a job for everybody” who loses one in the AGH closure.
Indeed, across the nation, says Boyd, government is good at finding ways to grow — even during hard times. “The numbers are dramatic and persistent over time,” Boyd says, “in recession after recession after recession.”
| Big Local Growers The top five Florida metro areas for local-government job growth: |
|
| Local Government |
Growth (Sept. 07-Sept. 08) |
| Port St. Lucie |
5.2% |
| Pensacola-Ferry Pass-Brent |
3.5 |
| Panama City/Lynn Haven |
3.0 |
| Bradenton-Sarasota |
2.5 |
| Fort Lauderdale-Pompano Beach-Deerfield |
2.2 |
