They are at it - the battle between Clark County, the State of Nevada and the Federal government...with Rory Reid leading the charge in Clark County over an alleged attempt by Gibbons to shove some child care costs off on the County. This story in the R-J has it pretty well, with the crux of the matter right here:

In fiscal year 2007-08, which began on July 1, the county's child welfare budget includes $41.9 million in county funds, $55.5 million in state funds and $6 million in federal funding.

The 5 percent budget reduction being considered for all state-funded entities except for kindergarten through 12th-grade education would hit child welfare hard, Morton said. In Clark County, 52 percent of the child welfare budget goes to making payments to foster parents and adoptive parents. The remaining 48 percent pays for personnel and emergency shelter services.

Gibbons wants a 5% reduction in expenditures - a good move given that we're likely to see much slower growth in revenues due to the housing market bust and its ripple effects through the State economy. Given that $55.5 million of the child welfare funds are State, that would work out to a cut of $2.775 million. The total County budget for this program is $103.4 million of which, according to the news story, $49.6 million goes for administration and emergency shelter costs.

We don't want to cut a penny off of emergency shelter funds and it is unfortunate that the exact figures for administration and emergency shelter are not broken out - which is probably deliberate because if you broke it out and found out that, say, $20 million of that is administrative, then anyone would be able to see that taking off a bit less than $3 million wouldn't be that hard. Of course, the word put out is that any cuts in staffing would affect case workers...but that is only because the bureaucrats who run the program are trying to scare everyone into opposing any cuts at all...I'm sure there are some senior administrators as well as some un-necessary personnel who can be let go.

Its not that I want to see anyone lose their job and I'm sure they're all a fine bunch of people over in our child welfare system (except, perhaps, the case worker who was recently arrested for child neglect, huh?), but things might get tight and when things are tight, you don't want to raise taxes, you don't want to harm the most helpless, and that means the only place we can cut is in personnel. Sacrifices must be made, as they always say, and the place for the sacrifices to start is in the employee pool - once we've cut that to the bone, then we can see about other means of covering all the necessities.

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