Thomas Breen photo
City Health Director Maritza Bond at Thursday's budget workshop.
Should the city add two new public health nurse positions to the budget … at a time when 25 already-existing nurse positions are vacant?
That question was at the center of a departmental budget workshop hosted Thursday night by the Board of Alders Finance Committee.
The in-person meeting took place in the Aldermanic Chamber on the second floor of City Hall.
Thursday’s meeting marked the latest public aldermanic review of Mayor Justin Elicker’s proposed $633 million general fund budget for Fiscal Year 2022 – 23 (FY23). If approved by the full Board of Alders, that budget would go into effect on July 1.
Under the microscope Thursday was the city Health Department’s operational budget, which is slated to increase by $230,340, from $4,276,123 to $4,506,463.
Thursday night's Finance Committee meeting.
City Budget Director Michael Gormany and city Health Director Maritza Bond explained that the lion’s share of that increase comes from the proposed addition of three new positions: two public health nurses at salaries of $45,501 each, and one public health nurse coordinator at a salary of $76,440.
Those are three of 25 new general fund positions the mayor has proposed including in next fiscal year’s budget.
Bond said that the public health nurse coordinator position, which was previously in the city’s budget but was de-funded several years ago, “provides an essential role in providing coordination between the school district and the Health Department.” That position is responsible for “onboarding [school] nurses, getting them training,” and providing “day-to-day scheduling support,” she said.
Adding two new public health nurses positions, Bond continued, would in turn “help us towards a goal of having fully staffed nurses” — that is, a nurse in every school.
Bond said that the city budget currently includes 44 public health nurse positions. Taking into account the city’s public school district as well as the local parochial schools the health department is responsible for covering, the city would need 54 public health nurses to have a nurse in every school, she said.
Alder Winter.
That’s when Prospect Hill/Newhallville Alder Steve Winter chimed in.
He pointed out that, according to the city’s latest monthly financial report, as of the end of February, the city had 25 vacancies among its 44 public health nursing positions.
What is that all about?
Bond said that the city is currently negotiating a new contract with the local nurses’ union. That contract expired in June 2020.
“We are up against an ongoing issue with competing salaries with the private sector,” she said. “We’ve been supplementing school nurses and clinical nurses through a temp agency. Hopefully, the union contract can be negotiated and we can have salaries to be more competitive.”
But if we currently have 25 vacancies, Winter continued, and if the alders sign off on adding two more public health nurse positions, that would mean two more positions to be filled. Right?
“To me, it seems like a tall order to fill all of those positions in the next fiscal year,” Winter said.
East Rock Alder Anna Festa agreed.
“If we can’t fill what is vacant now, how are we going to fill even two more?” she asked. “The main question,” she said, is: When will a new nurses union contract be finalized? Bond pointed out that that is out of her hands, and is really up to the city’s labor relations office and the nurses union.
City Budget Director Gormany and Bond.
East Rock Alder Anna Festa (right) with city Fiscal Analyst Don Hayden, Dwight Alder Frank Douglass, and Board of Alders Majority Leader Richard Furlow on Thursday.
Gormany and Bond said that, potentially, changes to the contract around public health nurse salaries may make it easier for the city to fill currently vacant and proposed new nurse positions in the budget.
“The goal was to really get a nurse in every school,” Gormany said. Thus the proposal to add two new positions. “Having these positions available if and when the contract is settled and we’re able to hire will be beneficial for the city.”
Festa emphasized that the city’s Health Department is competing for nurses with private medical facilities where “I believe their pay scale is probably a little different than ours.” She also pointed out that Yale New Haven Hospital is now partnering with local nursing schools directly to try to build out workforce pipeline to help with their own Covid-era staffing shortages.
“We’re looking at the entire gamut of things” to boost the city’s public health nurse staff, Bond said. “We can’t get into too much right now” during ongoing union contract negotiations, she said. But, “we’re hoping that, if we can come into an agreement with the union, that it will be an attractive package that will attract nurses to the municipal sector.”
“Hiring everywhere is at a standstill right now,” she said. She repeated that, hopefully, changes to a new union contract will “attract more people to New Haven.”
Finance Committee Vice-Chair Ron Hurt and Chair Adam Marchand.
Westville Alder and Finance Committee Chair Adam Marchand asked Bond about what she has heard directly from nurses about why they have left her department, and about why prospective hires might not want to join.
Does it all come down to salary?
Bond said her department does exit interviews with every employee who leaves. “We did have a number of employees that retired” this year, she said.
But, “let’s be frank, we were responding to a Covid pandemic. It was tough. While people were home relaxing, we were working seven days a week” in incredibly challenging circumstances.
She then returned to the issue of salaries. She said that one of her department’s full-time nurses wound up taking an additional part-time job because “our salary paid so low.”
“Salary was one of the major factors,” Bond said, “and the stress overall with the Covid-19 pandemic.”