San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Reforms intended to accelerate city’s hiring tied up in red tape
In January, San Francisco Mayor London Breed touted reforms to the city’s byzantine hiring process that she promised would slash by 40% the 255 days on average it takes to hire one city worker.
But six months later, a new San Francisco civil grand jury report about the city’s staffing crisis revealed that as of a few weeks ago, when the report was written, none of the reforms were implemented.
That’s because the plan to fix San Francisco’s infamous bureaucracy is tied up in still more bureaucracy.
The civil service commission, which governs the guidelines around city hiring that were created years ago to reduce nepotism, green-lighted the new reforms. But as required by state law, the city then offered to meet with unions, which nine wanted to do, according to the human resources department. Those meetings wrapped on June 5, and the commission must now officially approve reforms before they can go into effect, the department said.
The reforms aim to simplify the process to hire city workers amid a staffing crisis that had led to more than 1 in 10 government positions sitting empty, an increased reliance on costly overtime and worse outcomes in delivering critical services for residents.
“MUNI is running fewer buses, increasing passenger wait times. 911 call center answering time has increased and police response time has slowed, jeopardizing
San Franciscans’ safety.”
San Francisco civil grand jury report about the city’s staffing crisis
“MUNI is running fewer buses, increasing passenger wait times,” the report read. “911 call center answering time has increased and police response time has slowed, jeopardizing San Franciscans’ safety. Hospital capacity consistently exceeds staffing limits, resulting in diverted ambulances and reduced levels of care.”
The city’s job vacancy rate has doubled over the past five fiscal years as it struggles to recover from a pandemic hiring freeze and to recruit and retain workers as quickly as it loses them, the report said. The current process is too slow and arduous to compete with lucrative private offers in competitive fields in the Bay Area, which has a low unemployment rate but a high cost of living, the report found.
The vacancy rate peaked in the fall at 14% and has dropped to 11.6%, the human resources department said. That’s due to recruitment efforts at a hiring fair, transferring people from temporary to full-time roles and hiring workers provisionally, which is for a shorter time period but has less strict requirements, the department said.
San Francisco currently employs nearly 33,500 workers.
Critical including departments Muni, police and the health department, which runs San Francisco General Hospital, have felt the vacancies the most.
To address vacancy rates among nurses that ballooned since the pandemic began, the health department introduced several initiatives that reduce the median time to hire to 233 days, and in April announced an aggressive goal to cut the entire process to 60 days.
The problems are not new. Another civil grand jury report from nearly 30 years ago said the city’s hiring process was “incredibly cumbersome,” but reform efforts over the years have not resolved the issues, the recent report said.
The new reforms promise changes that are meant to remove barriers to hiring, speed up civil service exams, give departments more flexibility to recruit, modernize hiring rules to align with tech advancements and make hiring requirements more consistent across the city.
One example is to no longer require agencies to post opportunities on an actual bulletin board, and instead post them on the city’s employment website or other online platforms.
The report urged the city to do more. The grand jury recommended the city work with the commission to develop a hiring plan to reduce vacancy rates in critical departments, drop the time for reviewing already budgeted positions and cut the 1,000-plus job classifications the city has, each with their own requirements.