Public Employees Feel Fear and Anger as Layoffs Spread : Fiscal crisis: From New York to California, up to 50,000 could be let go. Some may never get jobs back.

Leticia Cruz’s worst fear is coming true. This Friday, barring some last-minute reprieve, the 30-year-old dental assistant at a city-run clinic will be out of a job, a victim of New York City’s worst fiscal crisis since the mid-1970s.

“I’ve been staying up nights worried about what’s going to happen to me,” said Cruz, a single mother with two children. “I don’t have enough money to see me through.”

Cruz is not alone. Thousands of state and local government employees have been laid off across the country. Thousands more, including more than 22,000 in California, are threatened with dismissal as governors, county executives, mayors and school boards desperately seek to balance their budgets for the coming fiscal year, which in most places begins Monday.

For Cruz, who got her pink slip just last week after three years with the city, there is a particularly bitter irony in being discharged so summarily. “I left 10 years of working in private practice because of the security and benefits of working for the city,” she said. “Now I have nothing. Who ever thought the city would go almost bankrupt?”

In most of the states and localities facing the deepest retrenchments, budget negotiations for the new fiscal year are still going on, despite rapidly nearing deadlines for action. Exactly how many public employees in the nation will lose their jobs is therefore hard to pin down, although estimates have run as high as 50,000 nationwide under a worst-case scenario.

But what seems unmistakably clear is that, at a time when private sector employment is beginning to show signs of rebounding from the nationwide recession, public sector employment is set to take a steep plunge.

In New York City, more than 6,000 municipal workers have been handed pink slips, and perhaps as many as 2,000 more are threatened with discharge as the city struggles to plug a gaping $3.5-billion hole in its proposed $29-billion budget for the fiscal year beginning Monday.

In neighboring New Jersey, Gov. James J. Florio says that the layoff of as many as 7,000 state employees is needed to offset a projected $1.5-billion deficit in next year’s budget, which is constitutionally required to be approved by Monday.

In the Midwest, Michigan Gov. John Engler’s budget for the fiscal year beginning in October proposes eliminating 3,000 state jobs through layoffs and attrition, and Illinois Gov. Jim Edgar wants to trim the state payroll by 1,400 workers. More than 2,000 state workers in Michigan already have been terminated since January.

In Texas, where legislators are to meet in a special session beginning July 8 to hammer out that state’s plans for the next two fiscal years, financial recommendations by the state comptroller’s office call for the elimination of 1,000 jobs. In both Houston and Dallas, mayors similarly are considering work-force cuts.

In California, which also is up against a Monday deadline for approving its state budget, state finance officials have warned that 22,105 state workers would have to be let go if the Legislature does not permit the use of public employee pensions funds to help offset an expected deficit of $14 billion.

Economists and public policy experts caution against reading too much in the coming wave of layoffs.

“Over time, as the economy improves, most of the public employees being laid off have a reasonable chance of being rehired,” said Frank Thompson, dean of Rockefeller College’s School of Public Affairs at the State University of New York in Albany.

But that is cold comfort for government workers headed for the unemployment line. “I feel good about myself because of the faith I have in God, but I don’t feel good about the economic situation,” said Gloria Groomster, 30, a $16,000-a-year clerk who is among the 215 workers scheduled to lose their jobs out of the 725 full-time employees in the Brooklyn public library system.

What is more, in contrast to previous recessionary periods, some states see the current economic pressures to downsize as a window of opportunity to keep state government operations lean and mean after good times return.

“We’re going to be looking at a whole reorganization and consolidation of state government over the next few years,” said Avice Meehan, chief spokeswoman for Connecticut Gov. Lowell P. Weicker Jr. Connecticut now plans to follow through on only 600 of the roughly 1,100 layoffs planned next fiscal year, but, in exchange, it has wrung concessions from the public employee unions worth $345 million.

Across the country, the mounting toll of lost government jobs has created widespread fear, anger, anxiety and heartbreak among state workers. Many also express an anguishing sense of betrayal at being let go.

“I always thought I’d have a job at the state,” said Debbie Zelinski, 34, a divorced mother of a 7-year-old daughter, who was sacked in March after 14 years of service at a state center for the developmentally disabled in Michigan and is still unemployed. “I’d planned on retiring there. Now, all of sudden, everything’s turned upside down.”

Even in states that have managed to avoid large-scale layoffs, employee morale is sharply down as a result of various cost-cutting measures, such as involuntary furloughs, wage freezes and delayed paydays.

“Our morale is in the basement,” said Mary Ann Turowski, president of the Maine State Employees Assn., which represents 10,000 of the state’s 14,000 workers.

The current rounds of layoffs are also reinforcing what many public employee union officers see as a deepening trend among Americans of doubt and skepticism toward holding government jobs.

“I’d hate to be an agency head trying to hire anybody,” said Lane Zivley, executive director of the Texas Public Employees Assn. “Why would you go to work for the state if you can’t count on that job being there come budget time? And it never fails, it’s the front-line people who get laid off, the one with the bed pan, the patrolman, what have you.”

In Pittsburgh, a proposal to save $10.5 million a year by laying off 247 public school employees, ranging from principals to janitors, highlights another downside to the nationwide fiscal crisis. “The bulk of the people will be young, and it will disproportionately harm minority professionals because they were the most recently hired,” said Supt. Richard Wallace in announcing the plan.

But, however bad losing their jobs may be, many government workers say there is a double jeopardy. The thousands of poor, elderly, homeless, sick and mentally disturbed whom they serve also face an uncertain future.

In Massachusetts, for example, more than 1,400 poor and working-class clients served by the East Boston-Winthrop Counseling Center--many of them emotionally disturbed children--will soon find themselves bereft of help. The entire staff is being laid off and the center closed.

When Tom Kelleher, 38, coordinator of children’s services at the center, broke the bad news to one 5-year-old client who is a victim of sexual abuse by a family friend, the youngster asked pathetically: “Do you think if I saved up my money, I could pay you myself, and you could stay?”

Said Kelleher: “You’re talking about children and families at critical points in terms of receiving some life-sustaining, life-supporting treatment. A comprehensive network of genuine community health services that have been developed in this state over the past 30 years is being quickly unwound. The impact is something that’s going to be felt for years, even into a future generation.”

Times researchers Amy Harmon in Detroit, Lianne Hart in Houston, Tracy Shryer in Chicago and Edith Stanley in Atlanta contributed to this story.