As a hub for sub-prime mortgage lenders, Southern California was at the leading edge of the global financial crisis. Today, the state has double-digit unemployment and an empty treasury.
The California State Public Health Laboratory (CSPHL), along with the rest of state government, has already shed student workers and "retired annuitants," a category of employees who have retired from state service and returned to work on a part-time basis.
Since last fall, all California agencies have been subject to a two-day/month furlough, amounting to a 2-3% employee pay cut. At first, government offices were closed the first and third Fridays of each month, for all except emergency work. In March, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger remanded that order and asked agencies to stagger employee furlough days to keep government doors open.
The biggest hit, though, is still pending.
In January, the governor instituted mandatory, across-the-board lay-offs of the least senior 10% of the entire state workforce. CSPHL Director Paul Kimsey, PhD, explained that "the bottom 10% was calculated and those people received layoff letters; they were put on notice that they were declared surplus and a layoff process was initiated."
However, because it takes about six months for authorities to work through all the civil service rules and regulations governing lay-offs, those "surplus" workers are still on the job, and Kimsey said the governor’s office is now rethinking the layoffs.
"If you’re an employee and you’ve received one of those letters, you’re wondering what’s going on," he said. "We don’t know what’s going on."
The one certainty is that such a huge loss—amounting to dozens of employees from essential support staff to scientists with highly specialized training—would devastate the laboratory.
Because the least senior 10% of the public health laboratory workers are distributed unequally across laboratory units, some units would lose few employees, while others would lose as much as 75% of their staffs.
The Food and Drug Laboratory Branch microbiology section, for example, would likely be so understaffed that it would cease all food regulatory testing and nearly all work to support foodborne illness investigations and traceback investigations of food products with microbial contamination. Such a development would reverberate well beyond California, a state that is, after all, home to an agricultural corridor popularly known as "The Salad Bowl of the World" and that exports more produce and tree nuts than any other US jurisdiction.
[A California spinach farm was the source of the E. coli O157:H7 outbreak that killed three people and sickened hundreds across the US and into Canada in 2006.]
Other Food and Drug Laboratory Branch staff losses would hinder the analysis of foodstuffs for chemical contaminants, such as melamine, potentially delaying product recalls and endangering health.
In the CSPHL’s Environmental Health Laboratory, layoffs would disrupt the development of new analytical methods and halt research on nanoparticle emissions from laserjet printers, as well as measurement of formaldehyde and other volatile organic compounds off-gassed by building materials.
Other CSPHL branches would suffer similar consequences.
Given that the California budget bill enacted in February has already fallen out of balance, with plunging state revenue creating a new, multi-billion dollar shortfall, Kimsey said the likelihood of proposed layoffs taking effect is "still very unclear" as of early April.
Concrete Losses, Questionable Gains
The piecemeal dismantling of laboratory units is undoing years of effort and millions of dollars of government investment in sophisticated public health testing. Often, this substantial sacrifice does not even bring expected cost-savings.
Luedtke noted a domino effect. He said, "Some of these state-funded positions do work for other state agencies for free. Now the state will have to pay someone else to do the work, probably for more money than it cost us to do it."
Government scientists also do fee-for-service work for private entities and other government jurisdictions. Overall, Luedtke reckons that for every $100,000 cut in state funds, the Utah public health laboratory foregoes an additional $30,000 to $50,000 in fee-for-service work that it will no longer be able to deliver. He estimates his total forfeited fee-for-service income at about $250,000.
In California, the proposed downsizing of the lab’s Food and Drug Laboratory Branch would leave it with insufficient staff to meet its obligations under three federal emergency preparedness grants, amounting to a potential loss of nearly a million dollars in annual federal funding. Elimination of the grant programs, in turn, would impact national emergency preparedness, since California would no longer assume its role as a key member of the Food Emergency Response Network, coordinated by the USDA and FDA.
Proposed staff losses in California’s Environmental Health Laboratory would endanger a $3 million/year CDC grant supporting a new state biomonitoring program, a groundbreaking effort to monitor residents’ exposure to select pollutants.
Once gone, some programs will be hard to resurrect.
Certain types of scientists are extremely difficult to recruit, especially in predominately rural states. Radiation chemists are so hard to find that Luedtke said, "We have a sense that radiation chemistry may be gone forever."