Despite ‘hard’ freeze, state hiring is up 8,000
State’s payroll growth since October lists 104 posts paying over $100,000
Gov. David A. Paterson, with much fanfare, last year ordered a “hard” hiring freeze to help contain costs for the deficit-plagued state budget.
But since October, more than 8,000 people have been added to the state’s payroll.
The new state workers — from college professors and snowplow operators to state troopers and even a ski school instructor — are on top of the more than 31,000 people hired during a previous three-month hiring period examined last fall by The Buffalo News during the freeze period, which began last July 30.
Among the latest new hires are 104 state employees making more than $100,000 — including a new department chairwoman at the University at Buffalo, who is getting paid $250,000 annually, and a part-time radiologist at a Brooklyn hospital, who is making $250 per hour. There are also 150 new employees at the State Senate since Democrats took control of the house last fall, payroll records show.
The Paterson administration defended the situation, saying that most of the new hiring was beyond its control. About 70 percent of the new employees work at agencies outside of Paterson’s direct command — such as the State University of New York, the Legislature and the court system—and thus do not have to abide by his hiring freeze edict. Paterson could only ask those agencies to abide by the freeze.
Of the remainder — about 2,600 people hired at executive branch agencies—about 80 percent are in health and safety jobs and so were proper exceptions to the freeze, Paterson administration officials said.
At the very least, the numbers show the many loopholes, even legitimate ones, that make a hard hiring freeze in state government a challenge.
But critics say Paterson has not tried hard enough to rein-in the costs associated with so many new hires in a time of fiscal gloom.
The numbers show that a hard hiring freeze does not work in government, said Elizabeth Lynam of the Citizens Budget Commission, a fiscal watchdog group funded by business interests.
“Hard hiring freezes don’t make a lot of real sense,” she said.
Instead, she said, the Paterson administration should focus on making state agencies more efficient, such as targeting current operations for downsizing or consolidation of services across agency lines. Hiring freezes “are more of a problem than a solution” because they don’t encourage agencies to act more productively or to target, for instance, reductions in redundant operations, she said.
“It really is about managing and trying to get some of the flexibility of the private sector into the public sector, and a hard hiring freeze is an arcane way of management,” Lynam said.
The governor last summer announced the hiring freeze as a way to reduce the state’s mounting deficit. Agencies would have to get approval for all hiring through the governor’s Budget Division, and only the most important jobs would be filled.
Overall, the number of paychecks issued to state government employees has not dropped from a year ago.
In the pay period ending Feb. 18, according to the state comptroller’s office, there were 270,113 state paychecks issued. A year earlier, the total was 270,146.
In 2007 during the same period, there were 264,104 workers, and in 2006, there were 269,262.
Health and safety jobs cover such positions as state troopers and nurses in various state facilities, said Jeffrey Gordon, a Paterson budget office spokesman. Also, revenue-generating positions—such as the 189 hires at the Tax Department, or 29 positions filled at the Medicaid inspector general’s office — were also exempt from the freeze.
Beyond those categories, the remainder of the hires were considered vital for health and safety, or were revenue-generating people “deemed essential for agency operations.” He cited unemployment claims processors at the Labor Department, which last week saw 26,500 claims—double from a year ago, according to the labor agency.
Is the freeze working?
“At the end of the fiscal year, we’ll have a better sense of what our overall [job] count is and the impact of the hiring freeze,” Gordon said, “but clearly, it’s been a useful tool in helping to control the growth of the state work force.”
The highest-paid worker hired since October is Ray Williams, dean of dentistry at the State University at Stony Brook. He makes $350,000 a year.
He is followed by Margarita L. Dubocovich, chairwoman of the pharmacology and toxicology department at UB, who is making $250,000 a year, according to payroll records.
The highest-paid hourly worker, at $250, is Brian Magee, a radiologist who works two to three days at SUNY’s Downstate University Hospital in Brooklyn. While he is listed on the state payroll, the hospital said, he is paid from funds generated by the facility.
The most prolific hiring occurred in SUNY, which added 3,681 workers since October, including hundreds of student assistants along with adjunct professors, clerks, librarians and cleaners. At UB, 474 positions were added, though most were student assistants. The City University of New York added 1,436 workers.
The 62-member Senate, now controlled by Democrats, put 150 people on the payroll since October; most, including a handful making over $125,000 a year, were added after the Democrats won the house’s majority in November. The 150-member Assembly added 210 workers. The state comptroller made seven hires, while the attorney general added 39. The court system has put 216 on the payroll since October.
At the State Police, 88 people were hired; most were troopers making $50,374 a year. The Office of Homeland Security added an assistant director of public information for $136,000 a year, while Paterson brought in three top aides at $178,000 each.
Others making more than $100,000 a year include dentists at state prisons, a new Public Service Commission board member and an assistant vice president and a research associate at UB. Nearly 50 percent of those making more than $100,000 are employed by SUNY or CUNY.
The Paterson-controlled agency with the most hiring was the Office of Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities, which added 620 workers.
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