CHP Cadets Hear Grim Words on Jobs

The next generation of California Highway Patrol officers was interrupted midway through basic training Wednesday with a warning that the state budget deadlock threatens to prevent them from being hired permanently.

“You are potentially a surplus employee of the department,” Assistant Commissioner Greg Augusta told the class of 144 cadets at the patrol’s training academy. Many had quit other jobs to join the CHP.

The cadets, wearing ball caps, crisp blue shirts and 9-millimeter pistols on their hips, sat at attention and expressed no emotion as Augusta said that they may join the unemployed when they graduate in October.

Surveying faces in the packed lecture hall, Augusta fought to control his emotions as he delivered the unhappy news to the cadets, who have finished the 14th week of the 27-week course. Training for each officer costs $125,000.

“This is the future of the California Highway Patrol right here in this room. We pick the best of the best,” he said, noting that this was the first potential layoff of CHP employees he had experienced in his 30 years with the agency.

He said department executives were “cautiously optimistic” that layoffs would not occur, but said the “truth is we don’t have a [state] budget.”

Because of the uncertainties involving California’s budget deadlock in the Legislature, state agencies are preparing to fire employees. At the CHP, 459 of its 7,081 officers are listed as layoff prospects. So are 367 of its 3,072 civilian employees.

Under state personnel rules, the cadets and permanent officers must be given at least 120 days of notice before they are removed from the payroll.

Augusta was a pinch-hitter for CHP Commissioner D.O. “Spike” Helmick, who was helping control demonstrators protesting a conference in Sacramento of food and agriculture ministers from around the world.

But Helmick, who joined the CHP as a traffic officer, said that layoffs of officers would adversely affect safety on California’s streets and highways.

“You can’t take that many people off the road without it having an impact,” he said.

After Augusta’s remarks, the cadets returned to their classes, disappointed at the news but hopeful that a budget would be enacted and that they would soon climb behind the wheels of patrol cars. But they also contemplated employment other than the CHP.

“I spent seven years in the Army,” said Taj Johnson of Los Angeles, a recently discharged diesel mechanic with a wife, an 18-month-old son and a mortgage. “To hear this after giving up a military career is disappointing.”

Johnson, a veteran of military service in Kosovo, Bosnia and Croatia, said that if he were not hired by the CHP, he would look for diesel repair work in the civilian market. If that failed, he said, “I’d just go back to the military, if they’d accept me. The California Highway Patrol is what I really wanted.”

Another trainee, Terasa Winston, a 31-year-old former Wal-Mart distribution center clerk and mother from Redding, said the prospect of looking for employment elsewhere is scary.

As a certified peace officer upon graduation, she said, she might look for a job at other law enforcement departments.

“Or, maybe I just bide my time until I come back [to the CHP]. They will have to start rehiring sometime,” Winston said.

Cadet Sylvia Mosley, 27, a former dispatcher at the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department, said she was troubled by the news but added, “I’m just an optimist. The operative word for me is ‘potential,’ as in ‘potential layoff.’ ”