Study: Nevada public employee staffing is lean

Good luck balancing the 2011-13 state budget through state employee layoffs, incoming governor. You're going to need it.

That's according to a new study from Columbia University that says "Nevada would have to more than double its public workforce" to hit the number of employees the study's models would expect the state to have.

The study by John Huber and Justin Phillips in the Department of Political Science at Columbia created a model to predict how many public employees each state would have based on population and other factors.

Results from Nevada showed the Silver State was the largest "negative outlier," meaning it fell further below the expected level than any other state.

The authors didn't attempt to say how many employees a state should have -- that's a decision for the policymakers of each state, they say -- it merely attempted to explain how states tend to set staffing levels and, based on those factors, see how individual states stacked up.

The study is important because the next governor of Nevada may have $3 billion less in projected revenue than in planned expenses for the upcoming biennium.

Both major party candidates -- Democrat Rory Reid and Republican Brian Sandoval -- have said they'll balance the budget without increasing taxes, which suggests cuts to personnel expenses such as layoffs and pay cuts.

The study results suggest it will be challenging to make significant cuts to state employee staffing levels without compromising service levels.

The results do, however, show there may be some wiggle room for the incoming governor to make cuts to personnel spending in the form of pay rates.

While Nevada's staffing levels were low relative to other states, the pay rate for Nevada employees was 4 percent higher than the model's expectation based on cost-of-living and other factors, putting Nevada in the top third of all states.

Authors say they were attempting to shed light on the issue by providing information to help policy makers answer important questions.

They write: "The problem that politicians contemplating layoffs obviously face is understanding how many employees can be cut without undermining the provision of public services that their constituents desire. How does one know if a state has 'too many' public employees or if those employees are being paid 'too much' money? How many public employees does it make sense for specific states to cut? By how much could salaries be reduced? Answering these questions is crucial to ongoing budget conflicts and, indeed, may provide important guidance to lawmakers. We offer one possibility for addressing these questions. The approach involves comparing states with each other to see if the relative level of public employment (or pay) in a given state is more or less than that found in similar states."