PROVIDENCE — In the blink of an eye, the state work force appears to have grown by more than 660 employees making anywhere from $11,780 for a part-time job at the Arts Council to $280,000 a year as a “project manager” overseeing other consultants in the Division of Motor Vehicles and traveling to Washington at state expense.

These are the state’s “contract employees”: doctors, lawyers, constables, marine researchers, respiratory therapists, typists, janitors, an “instructional barber” at the state Training School and page after page of computer programmers and “information-technology” consultants.

One out of 10 makes more than $100,000 a year, according to a report the state Budget Office gave House and Senate leaders last week.

They are not new to the work force. Many have contracts dating back years. But late last week, new staff-reporting requirements in the state budget brought their numbers — which the Carcieri administration earlier this year had said were almost impossible to determine — to light for the first time in years.

At lawmakers’ insistence, the numbers are also reflected in the hiring caps for each state agency, which swelled instantly, as a result, from a total of 15,202 “full-time equivalents” to 15,863.

And those numbers do not include dozens more working for the Department of Transportation as bridge inspectors, for example, under contracts with AG Lichtenstein Consulting, AI Engineers, Chas. H. Sells, DMJM&Harris and United International Corps; media consultants (Duffy & Shanley), project schedulers (Plexus) and management consultants (AGI Consulting).

State budget officer Rosemary Booth Gallogly yesterday described the list as a snapshot in time that will be used over the next few months to determine how many of these “contract employees” the state can afford to keep.

State administrators will have a choice. They can convert those they deem essential into full-time state employees between now and Oct. 1. After that date, they will have to publicly justify keeping — or hiring any new — contract employees at a public hearing.

At the very least, Gallogly expects the public discussion to put a spotlight on how much more or, in some cases, less a full-time state employee costs.

Coincidentally, Governor Carcieri is headed today to the Alton Jones campus of the University of Rhode Island for a private “retreat” with his department directors on the potential for cutting 1,000 state jobs. Republican Carcieri wielded the threat after the Democrat-controlled legislature attempted to trim spending in other ways he did not approve, including halting a promised capital-gains tax cut and freezing aid to education.

The lawmakers’ own focus on contract employees grew out of the administration’s no-bid award to the Foxboro, Mass.-based Smart Staffing Service last September of a contract — worth $7 million to $11 million annually — to provide hundreds of workers to state government at a 22.5-percent markup. Hearings on the circumstances surrounding the contract — and the administration’s unusual promise to front the company the money to meet each payroll — occupied a Senate oversight committee for months.

Administration officials seem hard-pressed to explain how some contract employees got hired, for example: the $280,000 a year no-bid contract awarded Marlboro, Mass.-based Project Solutions Group for the services of “Karen Barth.”

In a series of interviews over the course of a week, the Department of Administration’s new information-technology chief John Landers said the firm was initially selected, in February 2005, for an $80,325 contract from among the many firms listed on “master price agreement.”

Saying Barth has “extensive experience” bringing projects in on-time and on-budget, Landers said: “actually what her real qualifications are … we really don’t have at the state level.”

He was unable to produce any contract specifications, requests-for-proposal, letters of interest, project proposals or even a professional résumé for Barth or her company.

All he had was a purchase order stating what she was initially hired to do: “project management, staff augmentation, support and mentoring” for various technology projects at the courts, the Department of Environmental Management and the DMV, including the move to allow people applying for a driver’s license to register to vote at the same time.

As he explained in an e-mail: “Karen works for a vendor called Project Solutions Group which is on the MPA230 as a Project Management/Training support vendor. When the State PMO Office (Project Management Office) was being set up the PMO Manager (State Employee) contacted this vendor to support him in setting up and establishing policies and procedures. She was interviewed and hired.”

Jan Ruggeiro, the longtime elections chief in the secretary of state’s office, yesterday described Barth as an intermediary between the companies that installed the necessary computer technology at both ends — Viisage and Covansys — who also trained staff at the registry and AAA offices on how to relay the information properly. The roll-out date was August 2005.

According to Landers, she is currently poised to work with the DMV on the installation of a new $13-million “DMV modernization system,” after the winning bidder is chosen for that project. A DMV spokesman confirmed that the state is also paying Barth’s way to Washington in September to talk at a conference about the new security features states will have to encode in their driver’s licenses by 2009 under the federally mandated “REAL I.D.” program. The spokesman, Charles Hollis, said he did not know her background in this arena.

While Landers was the Department of Administration’s designated spokesman on its hiring of technology consultants, he acknowledged having little information at hand about the reported hiring of Ciber consultants Mark Shelepov and Tom Dickie at projected annual contract rates last year of $159,285 and $184,000, respectively, and Paul Pinto from NetCenergy at a projected $189,000.

The report that was given to legislative leaders — and made public at the same time last week — had job titles and projected contract costs, but no names.

House Finance chairman Steven M. Costantino, D-Providence, did not respond to inquiries. But one member of the oversight committee conducting hearings last winter, Sen. Frank Ciccone, D-Providence, said he was surprised the state was spending “all this extra money” on consultants — and even more specifically that it had “gone out once again on a no-bid award for an individual who is making over $200,000 a year” — after assuring the Senate it had hired “the most experienced and knowledgeable people in the field.”

With reports from State House reporter Elizabeth Gudrais.

kgregg@projo.com