Last year amidst all of the hullabaloo surrounding Abramson's announcements that in order to balance the sagging metro budget many employees would have to give up 4 furlough days. The exceptions to this rule were Police Officers and Firefighters due to contractual obligation and knowing full well it would be political suicide to tell the public that your safety will be put at risk because I wasted so much of our revenue on foolish decisions. (None of us have forgotten it was his poor financial decisions in the first place which brought us to this point.)
Staff shortages forced thousands of workers employed at Metro Government to report to work on overtime when a fellow co-worker was on a furlough day. That is correct. Abramson announced he was going to save 2 million dollars this way without bothering to check whether it violated contracts, labor agreements or state law as he foolishly threw his plan into effect.
We are all used to the smoke and mirror tricks coming from City Hall in order to fool the voting public, but this one took the cake. His plan to save 2 million did not work. In fact when the numbers were finally crunched, because he had to pay overtime to fill those slots the payroll was now 3 million because of the overtime.
Right before Christmas last year he received the bad news that he did indeed violate State law and is now being forced to return the furlough day money back to the employees it was taken from. Essentially, each employee was off a day without pay 4 times last year, other employees were forced to work overtime to fill their positions at time and a half. ( It would have been great if supervisors could have worked it out so when "A" was furloughed "B" filled in for them and vice versa.) After losing yet another ruling he will now have to pay on the final check in February those days he illegally took back.
I do not begrudge these workers one dime of that money. Last year he took it from them. It is pretty damn hard to pay your bills and manage your home budget when someone cuts a large chunk of your salary out of your check. They got a day off, but at the cost of not being able to pay a bill or take their families out to eat etc…
In truth then after the payroll is sent out this week Jerry's plan won't have saved 2 million dollars, but will have cost the taxpayers of Metro Government a total of about 5 million instead. It's apparent from many of his decisions over the years just how wrong he has been for this community. I wonder that if we were to dig a little deeper how many other decisions like these have turned around to bite the taxpayer's in the end?
The countdown to an Abramson Free Zone has begun. Just remember, with the primaries on the not too distant horizon, is this the person you want as a Lt. Governor?