States and municipalities are facing gaping budget gaps. Many have responded by slashing services, raising taxes and, for the first time in decades, making deep job cuts.
And public employees should brace themselves: Some economists say the job cuts could worsen in the second half of the year.
Counting companies that work with state governments, a total of 900,000 jobs could be lost to states' budget shortfalls, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a think tank in Washington.-----
Certainly private local government -- mandatory membership property owner associations -- has been adversely affected by the economic downturn as chronicled in the many posts to this blog over the past couple of years. As Evan McKenzie pointed out On the Commons last weekend, precisely because it's private government, there's little publicly available data on associations that makes it difficult to quantify how the recession has affected them.
There's evidence that the economic downturn isn't affecting public and private local government evenly. Texas attorney David Kahne notes in an item I posted earlier this week that economic pain in Privatopia has translated into economic gain for association management and law firms foreclosing on association properties in arrears on HOA assessments. My guess is county tax collectors conducting tax sales to recover delinquent property taxes aren't making much if any money on these sales.
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