Debate Continues Over How To Cut State Employees

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — State officials agree cutting government costs involves shrinking the state's work force.

But two years of debate over the topic have yet to yield any agreement about how best to eliminate jobs.

There's not even consensus on how many people work for state government. The numbers range from about 83,000 to more than 87,000 full-time employees, depending on who's doing the counting.

Treasurer John Kennedy is pushing a plan to cut 15,000 jobs over three years, and he says that won't require any layoffs.

The Jindal administration says the plan is based on faulty figures and would decimate staff at war veterans homes, medical facilities and prisons where employee turnover is highest but the jobs are most needed to be filled.