Governor Jerry Brown of California issued his first executive order on Tuesday directing agencies to reduce the number of state provided cell phones for government employees by half by June 1 of this year.
“It is difficult for me to believe that 40 percent of all state employees must be equipped with taxpayer-funded cell phones,” Brown said in a statement. According to the press release, the state provides and pays the bill for 96,000 cell phones for that 40 percent of state employees.
The executive order requires that number to go down to 48,000 by June 1, 2011, though in the press release, the governor acknowledged that there could be some difficulties in doing that, such as not wanting to incur fees in order to break “contract obligations.”
Brown said he hoped to reduce the number of cell phones the state pays for even further.
“Even with a 50 percent reduction, one-fifth of all state employees will still have cell phones,” he said. “That still seems like too much and I want every department and agency to examine and justify all cell phone usage.”
A reasonable justification, Brown noted, was for those employees who were required to be accessible at all times.
In an attempt to tackle California’s budget crisis, Brown introduced a budget on Monday that includes both tax increases and severe cuts across the board, hitting the state university systems, Medi-Cal, and California’s welfare program. Pursuant to the goal announced in the budget “to cut state operations by reducing waste and redundancies and associated costs,” the reduction in the number of state funded cell phones is expected to save about $20 million a year, according to the state’s Department of Finance.