City Grapples With Mounting Vacancies

City workers and administrators are leaving their jobs at a quicker clip than local government can find replacements.

Why is that happening? And what can the city do to catch up?

Top city officials grappled with that quandary during back-to-back aldermanic Finance Committee budget hearings.

The two public meetings and departmental workshops, held online last week over Zoom and YouTube live, gave the alders an opportunity to dive department-by-department into Mayor Justin Elicker’s two proposed Fiscal Year 2021 – 2022 (FY22) general fund budgets — a $589.1 million ​“crisis” version and a $606.2 million ​“forward together” budget.

What the alders consistently heard over the course of the combined 11 hours of budget reviewing is that, for a variety of reasons, city government is struggling to keep its workforce whole.

Those reasons, different top city administrators said, include the stress of the pandemic, better pay in the private sector, and an aging workforce steadily reaching retirement after a city government hiring surge in the 1990s.

Regardless of the reason(s), the result is the same: Retirements and resignations keep mounting up, and filling those personnel holes has proven a time-consuming challenge.

“One of the things we hear often is that, as those positions are vacant, the work does not go away,” City Budget Director and Acting Controller Michael Gormany told the alders last Tuesday night when stressing the importance of filling vacant positions. ​“The work still has to be done.”

He showed the alders a chart documenting a drop of roughly 200 non-sworn, general fund budgeted positions over the past decade and a half. ​“We’re at the lowest staffing level we’ve been at for a long time,” he said.

During Monday night’s regular bimonthly full Board of Alders meeting, local legislators voted to approve a $25,000 transfer from the city building department’s salary account to its overtime account — a move precipitated by what City Building Official Jim Turcio warned last month was a rapidly increasing loss of expertise and personnel to retirements and other jobs outside of the city.

And after those workers leave and before the city is able to bring someone new in in their place, various departments need more money for overtime to make up for current workers working longer hours.

According to weekly personnel reports sent out by email by the city human resources department, the city has seen 26 resignations and 21 retirements so far this year. That’s compared to 10 resignations and 17 retirements by this time last year.

As of Monday night, the city website’s job postings page listed 18 current job openings. Those included for account clerk IV for the city police department, accountant I, assistant corporation counsel, assistant plumbing inspector, chief administrative officer, city controller, LCI executive director, and public health nursing coordinator, among others.

Better Pay Elsewhere. Aging Workforce

East Rock Alder Anna Festa first brought the vacancy issue up last Tuesday night while questioning Gormany and Chief of Staff Sean Matteson about the mayor’s office’s departmental budget.

She pointed out that the city controller position, which is responsible for stewarding city funds, overseeing borrowing for capital projects, and overall city financial planning, has been vacant for over a year since Daryl Jones left the job at the beginning of the Elicker Administration.

“How many vacancies do we have?” she asked. ​“How many vacancies do we have for director leadership positions? And what is the plan for hiring, since those are important positions to have for transparency purposes?”

Gormany said that the city currently has roughly 90 to 95 non-sworn positions vacant, including three executive level roles.

That latter group includes the executive director of the Livable City Initiative (LCI), the city controller, and the chief administrative officer (CAO). Arlevia Samuel is currently serving as acting head of LCI, Gormany is serving as acting controller, and there is no acting CAO.

There have been plenty of high-level recent retirements in the city police, as well, both of down to one assistant chief and an acting top cop.

“We find it’s largely two things,” Matteson said about the persistent non-sworn vacancies.

“One is residency requirements for some of these significant positions. The other is competitive wages. A lot of times … people can make significantly more in the private sector,” and the city’s can’t match that.

“You really want to do government work and serve people,” he said about those willing to work for city salaries. ​“But it is not competitive out there in the private sector.”

He said the city has turned to some recruiting agencies to help with these executive-level searches, ​“and see if we can get some help identifying some individuals who are good fits to establish residency inside the city” and work these top-level jobs.

Just last week, the city announced the hiring of a new director of services for disabled people after that department’s long-time head, Michelle Duprey, moved to a new job in the corporation counsel’s office. Earlier in March, the city was also able to promptly fill the newly vacant role of director of public health nursing.

Matteson also said that the city has ​“a bit of an aging workforce,” which is contributing to a steady flow of retirements.

There was ​“a lot more hiring and people came in in the 90s into city government,” he said. They ​“found a good job, found a means to get into the middle class, and they stayed. And now they are beginning to exit. We’re seeing a lot of that.”

What’s the plan to fill those 90-plus non-sworn positions that are not executive level? asked Finance Committee Vice Chair and Westville Alder Adam Marchand.

Gormany said that, simply enough, hiring for a city job is not the swiftest of processes.

“A lot of these positions are general fund, and so they have to go through the civil service process,” he said. That means the city has to post a job listing for two weeks, conduct tests, and interview the top three applicants. ​“That can take a while.”

Gormany also said that the ​“crisis” version of the budget — which Elicker has pitched as a necessary backup if the city does not get $53 million in additional financial support from the state and Yale University — has $2.6 million budgeted for vacancy savings. ​“That is really a combination of a lot of things,” he said, including ​“reduction in force, accomplished through layoffs or early retirement packages or not filling those positions.”

The mayor’s ​“forward together” budget has $250,000 budgeted for vacancy savings.

Health Dept. Burnout

During Wednesday night’s budget hearing and departmental workshop, Finance Committee alders — while praising city Health Director Maritza Bond for her department’s prompt, flexible, tireless and largely effective response to the Covid-19 pandemic over the past 13 months — also pressed her on her department’s steadily growing vacancies, particularly among public health nurse positions.

Bond said that the city currently has 12 to 15 nurse-position vacancies. The city has been working with more than one temp agency to fill that need — not only for schools, but also for mass vaccination efforts.

“It’s been challenging,” she said. ​“I am concerned. I can’t compete with the market right now. Hospitals, the private sector pay significantly more.”

East Rock Alder Festa said that Bond’s department isn’t the only one struggling with vacancies. She also said this is one of the many problems associated with having 60 percent of the city’s property value off the tax rolls.

“Salary ranges are just not as competitive as other towns, as well as the private sector.”

Bond agreed. She also noted the unique stress and demands posed by the pandemic. ​“School nurses, they weren’t prepared to have to respond to Covid-19,” she said.

Marchand followed up on that very issue.

“There’s a significant amount of wear and tear on your staff, because we’ve seen the people leave,” he said. ​“I’m not asking about confidential personnel matters. But are you concerned about recruitment and retention of staff, given the immense amount of stress and strain your staff have deal with?”

Bond said that, at the beginning of the pandemic last March, she and many in her department ​“worked seven days a week for almost 60 consecutive days. … It is a heavy lift when we have the responsibility of protecting the health of our residents.”

As one strategy for keeping current staffers in place in their city jobs during the pandemic, Bond said she recently issued a memo ​“encouraging them to flex their time, to take personal vacation, and to know when to pause.”

“To show that example, I went on vacation,” she said. ​“I wanted to set an example, to say it’s ok to take a day off.”