Watch CBS News

Santa Clara Expected To Slash More Jobs

SANTA CLARA (KCBS) - The Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors was poised to trim more jobs Tuesday because of state and federal budget cuts.

More than 125 county employees had received notices of potential layoffs, and the supervisors were expected to formally eliminate 31 of those positions.

KCBS' Mike Colgan Reports:

The bulk of job cuts looked to be in the social services sector.

"These social workers help the case workers do things like transporting kids to visits, to court sessions, help basically set up events for the kids," explained social services director Will Lightbourne. "What they do is things like set up visits between parents and their children, they supervise the visits, help transport the kids there, they arrange visits between siblings."

Board of Supervisors president Dave Cortese, who would also give his State of the County address Tuesday, said the forecast was not ideal for the community.

"We're trying to read the tea leaves a little bit but it looks like another $200 million gap, almost purely as a result of state cuts," he explained the funding shortfall. "The state of the county is we're in solid fiscal condition, we still have our bond rating, none of that has slipped. We pride ourselves on balancing our budget every year and we'll do that again this year. But, we don't have the kind of reserves that we used to have. We don't have the margin for error that we used to have and there's a lot of uncertainty, a lot uncertainty."

(© 2011 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)

View CBS News In
CBS News App Open
Chrome Safari Continue
Be the first to know
Get browser notifications for breaking news, live events, and exclusive reporting.