Northey orders cuts for current budget year

DES MOINES – Iowa Agriculture Secretary Bill Northey said Tuesday he is using employee layoffs, unfilled vacancies and other budget cutbacks to adjust to a 15 percent spending reduction his department has to absorb this fiscal year.

To date, Northey said the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship has sent two layoffs notices and terminated one employee. Since last November, his agency also stopped filling positions vacated by employees who left the department's employment or retired.

As a result, Northey said, there currently are 26 positions vacant within his department that will not be filled – a level representing about 7 percent of the state agency's authorized full-time employees. The department also has proposed reducing the work hours by four hours for all employees during each two-week pay period in accordance with collective bargaining pacts, he added.

Officials with American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) have filed a grievance concerning the proposed work-hour reduction, and Northey expected the issue to go before an arbitrator in August. If the plan is not approved in arbitration, Northey said he would expect that significantly more layoffs would be required.

Along with making permanent layoffs and not filling open positions, the ag secretary said he has limited out-of-state travel significantly, cut program spending, altered cell-phone contracts to reduce costs, and continued other belt-tightening measures that were commenced in fiscal 2008.

 “We are committed to using every tax dollar we receive as efficiently as possible, but it is clear that cuts of this magnitude will have an impact,” Northey said in a statement. “These steps allowed us to finish the last fiscal year on budget and give us a good start to meeting our fiscal 2010 budget.”

The first-term ag secretary said his department also would be flexible in accommodating employees interested in taking voluntary time off without pay given the constraints for the current budget year that began July 1.

Department officials plan to make additional information about the agency's fiscal 2010 budget available online at www.IowaAgriculture.gov once additional decisions have been made, he said.

“The work of the department impacts all Iowans and we are trying to make these cuts in a way that minimizes the impact on the public and our employees as much as possible,” Northey said.

The agriculture secretary said his agency's fiscal 2010 budget was cut by 12 percent, reducing general fund spending from $22 million at the start of the previous fiscal year in July 2008 to about $18.7 million for the current 12-month fiscal period.

Northey said salary step increases provided for employees via a new two-year labor agreement, increased insurance costs, and reductions in federal grants also impacted the department's budget but were not funded by the Legislature. That created the need for his agency to find even more savings, he said.