Governor Bill Haslam spent part of his State of the State address Monday highlighting two small, but meaningful shifts in Tennessee’s budget. One is a reversal in the trend toward privatization.
TSEA executive director Robert O’Connell
The state’s transportation budget for consultant work has tripled in recent years, and now the department says its considerably cheaper to use state workers instead. That’s music to the ears of Robert O’Connell, executive director of the state employees association.
“We’ve been pushing for that kind of thing for quite a while and it’s great to see the governor go, “hey, it can go that way too.”
Still, there will be fewer state workers under Governor Haslam’s budget. He’s eliminating 1,100 positions, most of them vacant, bringing the total to roughly 44,000.
State employees have been reduced for at least the last five years. But higher education has sustained cuts for the last two decades. The governor says that stops this year. He’s proposing a small increase for the state’s university systems. Rich Rhoda is director of the Tennessee Higher Education Commission.
“The state is not going to be able to come back to where it once was.”
But Rhoda says the state funding – if approved by the General Assembly – would reduce the need for a larger tuition increase in the fall.
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