I'm a local elected official in California. Now, you have all heard of Cali's budget woes: there's no money for education and our local school district's budget is being cut maybe 10% this coming year--$2 million. We just issued layoff notices to 1/3 of our teachers for next school year (74 out of 200), although many of these teachers will ultimately keep their jobs (probably 17 will be lost). We always "over-notice" in order to have enough flexibility to lay off the needed numbers once we know how much money we are going to get from the state. (Don't get me started on how looney the system is!)
We suspect that the politicians in Sacramento will skim off the top of all fed dollars coming to Calif from the Stimulus. At this point, we do not know how much will make to our little town, but it may amount to $1 million. My question: how do we tout the money when it gets here, given the fact that we are still cutting our budget by $1 million.
See my problem? I want to make sure all the anti-tax crazies in our district hear all about how some stimulus money made it all the way from DC to our little corner of the Golden State. Yet, it won't save everyone who's losing their job, so layoffs will still be severe.
In fact, I'm greatly worried that the Stimulus $$ will not make a ripple in our bureaucratic consciences, and we will not ever be able to say what happened to it. I've asked our CEO to start thinking about this now, so when we get our Stimulus distribution, we will know it, and we will be able to let the public know it too.
If any of you PR types in Kos-land have ideas of how we can show the public that we a) got Stimulus money and b) spent it wisely, I'd appreciate hearing them.