City Council: Mayor must list municipal vacancies in monthly staffing report
WOONSOCKET — After getting some mixed messages about the supply of manpower at City Hall, the City Council has passed an ordinance requiring the administration to provide members with a monthly staffing report that will clearly list which positions are vacant and which aren’t.
Members voted unanimously to approve the new mandate, which is just the latest effort by the council to extract regular reports from the administration about the activities of various departments – information they say the public deserves, and needs, to effectively play their watchdog role and make budgeting decisions.
“It’s not just a one-time report,” Council President Dan Gendron said. “It is a monthly report we can look at as we go through the budget and as we look at expenditures throughout the year.”
The ordinance was on the agenda of the council’s Feb. 22 meeting, but it was tabled
on a technicality. There must be at least 11 days between first and second passage of an ordinance at regular council meetings for a proposal to become law – more days than there were between the introduction of the measure and Monday’s meeting, when it was reintroduced for first passage, said Councilman James Cournoyer.
The legislation has roots that date at least as far back as mid-December, when the council instructed Mayor Lisa Baldelli-Hunt to provide monthly summaries of activities from nine city departments. When the council engaged the mayor in a discussion about the administration’s ability to comply, she indicated that manpower might be an issue – a point Councilman Roger G. Jalette Sr. aggressively pursued for clarification during a series of subsequent meetings.
At one point he requested the administration produce a staffing report. After receiving it, Jalette concluded that 22 positions in municipal government were vacant.
The mayor quickly tamped down the information, however, saying that although the personnel department had accurately responded to Jalette’s request, the time period for which he sought the data had elapsed, making it out of date. In reality, the mayor said there were only nine vacancies – but Jalette responded later that those figures weren’t accurate either; at least two other budgeted positions that were not included on the mayor’s updated list were also vacant as of mid-February.
Among the positions that everyone agrees are vacant are some critical managerial posts, including that of the tax assessor, the director of planning and development and the code enforcement officer. The planning director’s position has been vacant since at least the end of 2020, and the tax assessor even longer – a situation Baldelli-Hunt says persists at least partly because the salaries they carry are not competitive.
Cournoyer says the concept of the staffing legislation is simple – to provide a clear list of which positions the council has authorized in the budget are vacant, and which are filled. Positions that are filled by temporary help will be listed as open.
The ordinance calls employee staffing “a key driver of both the city’s operational and financial performance” and observes that the council is “desirous of keeping (itself) and the public apprised on a monthly basis of the status of the city’s staffing with respect to the approved number of budgeted positions that are either filled or vacant...”
Despite voting in favor of the legislation, at least one member of the council was less than confident it’s going to achieve what the panel hopes it does. Councilwoman Denise Sierra said she has noted some improvement in the administration’s response to earlier ordinances instructing officials to convey information to the council, but overall Sierra said compliance has been unsatisfactory.
“I don’t know if writing legislation continuously like this is going to get us where we need to be without consequence,” said Sierra. “We can keep writing and writing until we’re blue in the face, but it keeps producing mostly the same end result.”
But Gendron expressed confidence in Finance Director Christine Chamberland’s ability to compile the staffing reports in a regular and timely fashion.
“I think we heard from the finance director,” he said. “I trust she will be doing this for us. She understands the value of it, too. I’m not concerned until I need to be concerned.”