Stone soup

The Board of Supervisors of my county voted today to cut millions of dollars, hundreds of jobs. Read the article, it does a better job of explaining the details of the approved budget cuts.

I was at that Board of Sups meeting today. From a little before 9:00 this morning until nearly 2:00 this afternoon. Public comment was still going on (wrapping up, though) when I left. Hundreds of people spoke. Social workers, eligibility workers, clerks, foster parents, adoptive parents, attorneys, community members, former CPS clients all turned out and spoke from the heart. Adult Protective Services faces huge cuts in a tiny department. It's brutal.

One of the sups said at one point during public comment, "You make it sound as though we have a choice about making these cuts. We don't. We have no choice." The point was that we know cuts have to be made, but the cuts as proposed will break the Bureau. Some estimates from workers and supervisors indicate that 80% of the workers in my district office will be laid off. Workloads for remaining social workers will double. APS will lose over 60% of its small workforce. One of the people who spoke sounded like an individual with lots of job security -- 30 years with the county, and a pretty high-level individual. He got a warning letter.

Things are bad all over. It's an incredibly scary time for me. I never thought that I would see the kinds of headlines that have been all over every media source for the last few months. I never thought that good, secure, necessary, federally-mandated county jobs would be subjected to the axe like this. I never expected that this country would face another Great Depression, but it looks like that's exactly where we're headed. I feel super lucky for the opportunity to have already had an interview with another county. Things could still work out. But I'm appalled at what's happened here. I'm horrified at the careless disregard that this county is demonstrating toward its employees. I'm disgusted that they must have known this was coming, and over 100 people will be getting pink slips within the week, and summarily dismissed on New Year's Eve. I'm outraged at the mismanagement: less than four months ago, they hired four new people, and spent nine weeks putting us through an intensive training unit. The waste just sickens me.

Needless to say, the atmosphere in my office is dismal. My colleagues are angry, stunned, deflated, worried and depressed. We still have three weeks to slog through. We still have the long march of the pink slips calls, whenever those come out. We still have families to serve, investigations to complete, court reports to write, children to protect. We have to find new jobs, get our own families through the holidays, figure out how to hold on to our remaining assets. It's exhausting.

And tomorrow, I get to drive to Novato (over an hour away from where I live) for another day of training. For real.