State hiring outpaces population, group says
OLYMPIA – A conservative public policy research group has an issue with state government hiring, saying the increase in government workers outpaces population growth in Washington.
The state Office of Financial Management reports that the number of full-time workers employed by the state has increased by 16.3 percent since 1996, not counting local government employees and teachers.
Analysts at the Evergreen Freedom Foundation say that comparatively, Washington’s population grew 12.4 percent in the same period.
“I’m not saying we should be at the levels we were in 1996 per se, but we shouldn’t be increasing how many positions there are faster than the state’s population growth,” said Jason Mercier, a budget analyst at the foundation. “As you increase that ratio, it’s an increase in the amount of government that used to be doing that same job.”
Democratic leaders counter that the group has constructed a simplistic argument that does not take into account policies such as tougher prison sentencing.
House Majority Leader Lynn Kessler, D-Hoquiam, said the Legislature has simply been responding to various public mandates.
“A huge amount of that growth is in our Department of Corrections,” Kessler said. “We have ‘two strikes you’re out’ for sex offenders. We have ‘three strikes you’re out’ for certain crimes. We have more tougher sentences – you see it every year: ‘Oh, we’ve got to keep them in there longer.’ “
Ed Penhale, spokesman for the Office of Financial Management, said Corrections employment grew from 6,102 in 1996 to 8,777 in 2005, a 32 percent increase.
He said the state added employees to manage a prison population that grew from about 12,000 to 17,000 in the same period, up nearly 42 percent.
Mercier said a large part of the problem was the residual expenses from the boom years of the 1990s, when lawmakers added a lot of new programs with the surplus revenue that poured in.
“We kind of got away from the core functions (of government) only doing those things that government should be doing, like public safety and public health,” Mercier said.
Kessler said prison staffing accounts for roughly 74 percent of employees the state has added in the last decade.
Increases in state employment “cannot possibly be correlated to growth of population, but more the growth in population in our prisons,” Kessler said.