7.2. SR 06-07-2010Item # 7.2.
liver
MEMORANDUM
TO: Mayor and City Council
FROM: Lori Johnson, City Administrator
DATE: June 7, 2010
SUBJECT: Discuss Staffing/Personnel Items
At Monday's meeting I will be prepared to discuss with the Council a plan for addressing the
vacant department head positions. In addition, I am bringing forward a proposal for
Council consideration that would help alleviate the difficulty that the elimination of overtime
and mandatory use of compensatory time have created.
The first and most important item is determining how to proceed with the open department
head positions. It takes a minimum of three to four months to fill a department head
position; therefore, making a decision soon is critical to getting someone hired before the
end of the year. These department head positions are important leadership roles that
provide decision making, guidance, and policy direction to departments to improve our
delivery of services and to provide creative and efficient, economical solutions to the
difficult decisions that axe ongoing with the severely limited budgets under which we all
function. Unfortunately, our budget situation does not allow us to fill all department head
positions at this time. However, assuming that there are no additional revenue reductions in
2011, which is reasonable because there is no longer any state aid included in the budget,
two of the positions can be filled within the existing budget. In addition, if the positions are
filled at an entry level, there will be a budget savings of around $15,000 fox each position.
Second, there were several steps the Council has had to take to balance the budget that have
affected staff and staffs ability to provide the same level of service as in the past. One such
item is the elimination of overtime fox all employees except police public safety response and
the overtime required to be paid by policy or contract. Employees are still required to put in
extra hours, but those hours must be taken as compensatory time off. This places an
additional burden on affected departments because in many cases their staff has already been
reduced and now there are fewer employee hours available to do the work because of the
requirement to take compensatory time off in lieu of pay. One way to ease this burden
without affecting the budget is to allow additional vacation carry over for non-union
employees and union employees whose contract does not contain specific vacation carry
over language. Currently, employees axe allowed to carry over as much vacation as they can
earn in a year; any vacation time in excess of the carry over amount is lost if not taken by
year end. Increasing the carry over amount would allow employees to use their
compensatory time off in lieu of vacation time thereby providing more productive work
hours to the department. In other instances where an employee doesn't have compensatory
time but it is difficult for that employee to arrange to take all of the vacation time, or for a
supervisor to authorize use of the time, because of reduced staff and increased work load,
this would eliminate any penalty to those employees. There is no immediate financial impact
to allowing the vacation carry over to increase as the vacation time could be taken in the
future. Allowing additional carry over would increase the compensated absences liability in
the financial statements until the time is used or paid at termination; however, the increase is
not significant and it would not affect the City's cash position. If the Council agrees to this
proposal, the change would affect current non-union employees and union employees whose
contract does not contain specific vacation carry over language by allowing the employee to
carry over up to two times the amount of vacation the employee is eligible to earn in a year.
This could either be a temporary change with a sunset date by which the additional vacation
must be taken or a change in the Personnel Manual. Either way both the City and
employees would experience benefit from the change.