City Hall preps for another short-staffed budget season

WOONSOCKET – City Council raised the alarm on persistent vacancies at City Hall during their meeting Monday night, reigniting an old debate but reaching no conclusion on how to remedy the issue.

“It’s painful, and I think… we’re going to lose opportunities, and in the long term, I think we need to bite the bullet and find out what we’re doing wrong, if there is something wrong,” said council member David Soucy at Monday night’s special meeting.

At least five positions remain vacant, plus three positions filled by temporary employees, according to the Mayor’s office. Among the open positions are tax assessor, which has been open for over a year, despite the City Council increasing the annual salary for the position in an attempt to attract more candidates.

“City assessor – we know the story with that. It’s the same thing over and over again: underpaid and not enough of them in the state,” Mayor Lisa Baldelli-Hunt told the council.

Both Baldelli-Hunt and the council also raised concerns about relying on temporary or part-time employees in financial offices such as tax assessor and treasurer as the budget process begins this month.

Temporary or part-time employees have stepped up to fill vacancies in other positions as well, including interim City Planner Kenneth Kirkland and Acting Building Official Donald Gagnon. Some retirees have also been helping out, including the former purchasing clerk and former tax assessor, Baldelli-Hunt said. She added that relying on interim or temporary workers can exacerbate the issue by burning out employees who have to take on extra work from other roles.

“You can’t expect people to be working at the level that they’re

working for extended periods of time because they continually have to pick up the work of the positions that are not filled,” she said.

In addition to competition among other municipalities, Baldelli-Hunt cited a couple reasons why certain positions are hard to fill. She said nonunion employees were difficult to retain because they don’t benefit from the guaranteed raises negotiated into union contracts. To address the problem, Baldelli-Hunt said she’s included increased salaries for some nonunion positions in her proposed budget, which is expected to be released this month.

She also pointed to the fact that the majority of positions in City Hall require the personnel board to certify the list of candidates eligible to fill the role in order to insure the candidates “actually possess the qualifications required,” according to the city charter. The personnel board also takes into account candidates’ scores on “competitive examinations… used to determine the merit and fitness of applicants” for certain jobs when creating those lists.

“The fact that a personnel board has to certify a list is ridiculous,” Baldelli-Hunt said. “I mean, why do they need to certify a list? They either passed the test, they didn’t pass the test, they’re going to get interviewed, the solicitor looks at it – it’s just extra steps that take time.”

Council member Valerie Gonzales suggested it could be low morale, and not just salary, contributing to persistent vacancies, to which Council President Daniel Gendron added that the council has done its best to accommodate salary increases and still struggled to retain employees.

“We’re never going to be the top paid municipality in the state or the regional area, but we have to be a place that people want to work, and I think that’s what City Hall is missing right now,” Gendron said. “We need to better take care of the people who are here now.”

Baldelli-Hunt adamantly denied that City Hall is a “hostile work environment” and countered that the council is not blameless, particularly in the planning department where employees’ projects are subject to council approval and may not move forward.

“When people are very attached to the work that they do and they put in a lot of time and effort but it gets stifled for political reasons, that’s when people become unhappy, too,” she said, shortly before walking out of the meeting.

The city may also be hampered by a downward trend in government employment, which mirrors the national trend of employment’s slow return to pre-pandemic levels. Rhode Island employment in federal, state and local government jobs decreased by about 2% between 2020 and 2021, according to the most recent employment estimates from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Open positions and their corresponding job applications can be found on the city’s website.