BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) - The East Baton Rouge Parish Clerk of Court’s Office laid off 12 employees over the past two weeks, citing budget constraints and declining revenue over the past two years.
The Advocate reports (https://bit.ly/1RUc5Uu) the layoffs come as the state Inspector General’s Office is investigating questionable spending practices by the agency’s top administrators.
Some employees who were laid off have cried foul over the reduction in force, citing what they characterize as mismanagement at the top. They take issue with generous salary increases for some administrative employees while rank-and-file employees had to forgo cost-of-living increases in recent years.
“Going into the second half of 2015-2016 fiscal year, the Clerk of Court’s Office has determined that it is necessary to reduce its workforce,” said Fred Sliman, a spokesman for Clerk of Court Doug Welborn. “Revenues for the first half of the 2015-2016 fiscal years have not met projections, and in order to avoid a budget deficit, reorganization in workforce is necessary.”
The Clerk’s Office had 139 full-time employees and 37 part-time workers before the layoffs.
Joyce Swearingen, who worked for the Clerk’s Office for 31 years, was among those let go last week. She said the budget issues in the office were well known and didn’t happen overnight.
“I think it’s just too much spending and mismanagement of money,” she said. “There are inflated salaries for a few special people, but the clerk has not given across-the-board raises for the last two or three years.”
Three other employees who said they were laid off declined to be identified for this story because they are searching for other jobs.
The recent layoffs will generate a savings of $537,532 annually, Sliman said. Prior to those cuts, he said, other positions were eliminated as people quit or retired, resulting in a total savings in payroll of $767,031.
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Information from: The Advocate, https://theadvocate.com
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