Budget cuts

It has been a rough day at ADOA, the agency I work for here at the State. Our State is currently about $1.6 billion in the red so massive cuts have been ordered effective this past weekend when the legislature passed the budget for the rest of the fiscal year. ADOA has had more than $30 million swept and now has to lay off 138 of the little over 800 employed with the agency. Granted, a lot of those positions are positions that have been left vacant because of finances, but not all of them are. Once the new fiscal year starts on July 1 more cuts may come. It's all up in the air until the legislature tackles that too. Basically no one is safe.

This afternoon my boss' boss called us into her office to let us know that they just laid off 2 people in our unit effective Friday. There are only 13 in my unit, so that 2 person hit is big for us. I am thanking God right now that I was not one of them. I don't know what John and I would have done if I had lost my job, especially now that we have Olivia. I have been fairly stressed about it for several weeks, but increasingly so since this past Monday when our director sent out an e-mail saying it was going to be difficult but jobs were going to be affected.

While I was totally freaked out, and still am to a degree, I am also incredibly relieved. Not just because I still have my job, which I am so thankful for, but because we know what is going to happen to our unit. The suspense of not knowing was awful. I feel happy, sad, guilty, relieved, all at the same time. I'm also very curious to see what happens to the rest of our HR division. It's quite a mix of emotions. It sucks!