news-record.com

We got yet another piece of data today in the ongoing effort to figure out what exactly the state budget did this year, this time in the form of an Office of State Management and Budget memo to the Joint Appropriations Committee.

The report (linked here, complete with my messy note) says that North Carolina is paying severance to the equivalent of 1,629.06 employees statewide. (For those wondering how you get 6/100 of an employee, it has to do with how positions are funded, part time jobs, etc…) At any rate, it would be fair to say at least 1,629 PEOPLE – probably more – are getting some sort of severance benefit from the state as a result of this year’s budget.

Within that group are 516 local education employees – read: teachers and others who work with the schools – who lost their jobs this year.

This would be all fine and good if those numbers didn’t conflict so drastically with other available data. For example, the Department of Public Instruction reported (links: release | spreadsheet) that 2,421.1 positions were laid off this year across the state, part of 6,382.9 positions that were in the classrooms, libraries and other parts of the public schools last year but aren’t this year.

And groups like Progress NC (link)* have been touting data from the Employment Security Commission that shows 13,7000 public sectors workers lost their jobs between August and September. However, that number includes federal, state and local workers, not just those paid from state funds.

Together NC, a coalition of groups, cites numbers that estimate the total impact of the budget will be 30,000 jobs lost (link), but that's across the private and public sectors, much of it due to Medicaid cuts.

So what’s the truth? How many layoffs did the state budget cause? Well, if you take 1,629 as your low-ball number and 30,000 as the top end of the range, it’s probably somewhere in the middle.

As Rep. Mickey Michaux, a Democrat who has made the case the state budget has been harmful, told Sen. Richard Stevens, a Republican who built the budget, at the end of the joint appropriations meeting Wednesday morning: “I would suggest that neither one of us make any wild claims until we find out what has actually happened and how they were actually arrived at.”

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* An earlier version of this post attributed the Employment Security methodology to Together NC when it should have been Progress NC.