I suppose we shouldn’t worry too much about Governor Kristi Noem’s nepotism. She’s making sure we can afford her well-paid kin by keeping the state’s permanent employee count lower than Governor Dennis Daugaard did:
For Pay Period #11 of this fiscal year, it looks like Governor Noem has about 20 fewer permanent state employees than Governor Daugaard heading into the final days of his Administration. That’s a difference of 0.3% from last year’s PP11 count and 1.3% from the FY2017 count. The only time Noem has had a bigger permanent state workforce than Daugaard appears to be in May and June, when her count jigged a little higher than the FY2016 count.
That graph thus still gives Noem room to hire her other daughter, her son, her mom, and her brothers (not that they’d want to give up their current more lucrative government gig) and not have anyone watching overall state employment notice.
Some observations:
These are rather small fluctuations in FTEs. Is there a breakdown on each Departments and which functions? Are the fluctuations occurring in lower level or upper level employees?
Do you notice how the last month to month and a half or every fiscal year, the number of employees increases? Is that because you are hiring to make sure authorized FTEs in your budget are filled, or some other reason?
Wouldn’t you expect the lines to match up a bit more from the 24th pay period of the previous fiscal year to the 1st pay period of the next fiscal year? What’s going on? Is there a re-definition of what is an FTE or a “permanent work force” with every fiscal year? Is there a shift from full time to part time employees or vise versa?
Are the reductions due to hiring consultants to make it appear you are reducing the state workforce?
Mr. Pay knows about what he talks. Who says these fellows are not doctoring the numbers? grudznick does not trust these numbers.
Yeah, I’m just asking questions, but something appears off with those graphs.