What happened to those 750 layoffs?

Tom Fahey reports in the Union Leader on the State Employees Associatin promise to fight to keep every job that Governor Lynch wants to cut. He also shows where the cuts are coming.

Nearly half the workers affected by the changes are at the Department of Health and Human Services, the state's largest agency. HHS Commissioner Nicholas Toumpas said in an e-mail to workers that HHS's share of the cuts comes to $8.8 million, and that he'll cut or transfer 150 workers.

The cuts Lynch is making are well below the 750 jobs he and his staff warned would go if the SEA rejected a contract that called for 19 unpaid furlough days over two years.

Lynch said Tuesday that the first estimate of 750 jobs was not based on hard math, but on averages, figuring between $50,000 and $70,000 in wages and benefits per job. As department heads dug deeper into how they'd implement layoffs, the number of cuts began to fall.