PERTH — Gov. David Paterson called Wednesday for 50 unused beds at the Tryon Boys Juvenile Rehabilitation Center in Perth to be cut as part of his strategy to close the state’s budget deficit.

Administration officials characterized the bed reduction as an effort to “right-size” the Office of Children and Family Services’ juvenile justice system.

Paterson said he wants to close six underused youth facilities: the Adirondack Residential Center in Clinton County, the Cattaraugus Residential Center and Great Valley Residential Center in Cattaraugus County, the Pyramid Reception Center in the Bronx, the Rochester Community Residential Home in Monroe County and the Syracuse Community Residential Home in Onondaga County. In addition to cuts at Tryon, Paterson also wants to downsize the Allen Residential Center in Delaware County.

OCFS Director of Communications Edward Borges said the cuts at Tryon would likely affect 39 staff positions at the facility, but he wasn’t sure how.

“This means closing down one of the cottages, and it also means moving staff. By closing 50 beds, we will also be reducing 39 funded positions at Tryon. We don’t know definitively what that means yet,” Borges said.

Civil Service Employees Association spokesman Steve Madaraz said his union, which represents the employees at Tryon, does not have any minimum staffing requirement protections in its contract with the state, so the state is within its rights to make cuts. He said he wasn’t sure if Paterson’s proposals will mean job eliminations.

“We were as surprised as anybody when this came out, and we don’t take too kindly to what we heard today based on the fact that OCFS has been promising that they really want to work with us, cooperate and build a better system. To have something like this be announced without any kind of heads-up, that undermines any sense of trust we had with the agency,” Madaraz said. “We don’t know [what will happen to the 39 positions]. We don’t know if they know themselves.”

Since the election of former Gov. Eliot Spitzer in 2006, OCFS has been in the process of attempting to transform its juvenile justice system away from a costly correctional facility model to a less expensive therapeutic model that doesn’t involve relocating downstate youth to upstate juvenile facilities like Tryon. Borges said the total number of children OCFS has living in facilities like Tryon has fallen to about 1,000 from a high of 2,200 in 2000. Although the number of children in the system has dropped, staffing levels have been maintained, resulting in an ever-rising cost per child in the system, half of which is paid by the child’s home county. Borges said the state estimates that it costs $200,000 per child to fund the current system, which has 500 empty beds across the state.

“At Tryon, we have very few kids there. Our census as of yesterday at Tryon limited-security boys, which has 180 beds, was only 24 kids,” he said.

OCFS officials said the Tryon campus has different sections based on gender and security levels. The higher-security girls’ section of Tryon as of Tuesday had 30 beds and 10 girls, and its girls’ limited-security section had 57 beds and 24 girls.

Borges said OCFS was fortunate to have empty beds it could cut to save money, which protected other programs like its child abuse hot line.

“Just for this fiscal year, if we manage to shut down all of these empty beds across the state, we’ll be able to save just over $1 million. Next year, we’ll save about … $16.2 million,” he said.

Madaraz said OCFS has purposely created empty beds in its system to justify closing them.

“They have to have adequate staffing to meet the objectives of the program, and with the downsizing that they’re looking to do, they aren’t going to have adequate staffing,” Madaraz said. “They’ve been downsizing and moving [the children] out and then claiming, ‘oh there’s not enough people in there to adequately operate [facilities] cost-effectively.’ ”

Borges said the supply of children into its system has been dwindling since areas like New York City began funding their own cheaper programs to keep troubled youth at home and avoid paying half the child’s cost to OCFS.