Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, July 14, 1995 TAG: 9507140045
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: RICHMOND LENGTH: Medium
Their smooth transfers have prompted a Democratic legislator's criticism that the Republican administration is circumventing a plan to slash the state payroll to take care of its own.
The four assistants have landed jobs with state agencies in recent weeks. All found positions exempted from a continuing hiring freeze, carved from vacant slots or new ones.
``There were some very talented people who worked in the Cabinet secretaries,'' said planning and budget director Robert W. Lauterberg, who just hired two of the staff members.
But Democrats, who forced Allen to cut Cabinet employment by 31 positions after it swelled to an unprecedented 84, said the administration is protecting Republican loyalists while using buyouts and firings to eliminate the jobs of nonpolitical workers.
``What they're doing is creating positions,'' said Sen. Richard J. Holland, D-Isle of Wight County, head of a legislative commission studying the state work force.
``The executive branch is increasing the number of persons in agencies under its control ... instead of decreasing,'' Holland said.
Cabinet employees have been leaving since the spring, when the Assembly affirmed its demand for reductions in the secretaries' staffs.
Among the four who recently took agency positions, Robert Baratta, previously a special assistant to Secretary of Commerce and Trade Robert T. Skunda, has joined Lauterberg's department as the deputy director for regulation.
Julie K. Overy, former communications director to Secretary of Natural Resources Becky Norton Dunlop, is now a policy assistant to Lauterberg, but reports to Baratta.
Baratta's and Overy's jobs were exempted from the moratorium on hiring and from a provision in state law sought by the governor that requires positions vacated under a recent buyout plan to be erased from an agency's payroll.
Lauterberg refused to disclose their salaries, but said Baratta and Overy are being paid about what they made in their Cabinet jobs.
Another Cabinet media aide, Martin D. Brown, just became spokesman for the Department of Social Services. Brown was press secretary to Secretary of Health and Human Resources Kay Coles James, who had a staff of about a dozen - twice that of her Democratic predecessor.
Rosanna L. Bencoach, who was a special assistant to Secretary of Public Safety Jerry W. Kilgore, last month shifted to a policy position in the Department of Youth and Family Services. The agency, within Kilgore's secretariat, runs juvenile jails.
by CNB