City struggles to bring down high job vacancy rate
Mayor says recent incentives include 8% raises — 16% for police — bonuses, down payment aid for first responders
In spite of varied efforts to hire and retain staff citywide, the overall staffing vacancy rate for the city of Santa Fe remained at about 20% as of January, according to a new report.
The vacancy rate, which reflects the percentage of empty staff positions across all city departments, is right back where it was reported to be in a city staff memo one year ago. A summer 2022 spike to 25% was possibly caused, at least in part, by new and reorganized roles in a newly implemented budget.
Santa Fe’s stubborn rate of staffing vacancies towers over the current 4.3% average for state and local government entities reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but the city’s numbers are comparable to recent ones from the city of Albuquerque (20%) and lower than the state government’s (24.3%).
As a pre-COVID-19 comparison, financial records from 2016 indicate Santa Fe’s staff vacancy rate fluctuated from 2% to 8% that year.
The recent city vacancy report features monthly rates for the first seven months of the current fiscal year, and it does show a steady downward trend in the number of empty positions in almost all of the departments and divisions the city staffs.
City Clerk Kristine Bustos-Mihelcic said the city began compiling staffing vacancy data regularly in July 2022 and that such reports for previous months and years were not available.
The two departments with vacancy rates higher than 30% are Finance and Public Works. The latter department is the only one that has seen a shrinking staff over the last several months.
At least some blame for Santa Fe’s two years’ worth of late financial audits has been attributed to staff vacancies. When the vacancy rate in the Finance Department was 40% a year ago — it is 31% currently — a staff memo seeking funds for audit preparation help stated the delays were due in part to “unprecedented circumstances” such as the personnel gaps in Finance as well as a 20% vacancy rate across all city departments and “turnover in the Accounting Officer position,” which was filled last year.
During an interview Friday, Mayor Alan Webber said the vacancy rate doesn’t tell the whole story, partly because there are “historically positions that never get filled” and funding for some of those might have been reallocated to a particularly important hire.
Nevertheless, Webber pointed to the recent 5% across-theboard decrease in city staffing vacancies as a result of his administration’s aggressive recruitment and retention policies.
“I think that will continue to go down,” he said. “It’s a function of paying attention to it. And it’s a fundamental management principle that the things you establish as a priority and then measure are the things that get done.”
Webber listed off some new incentives the city negotiated or unveiled in the last two years: 8% raises for most employees — 16% for police officers — sign-on and retention bonuses and a pilot home down payment assistance program for first responders.
In December, city police Chief Paul Joye touted his department’s vacancy rate dropping from 22% to 10% in 2022. He attributed the change to a mix of financial incentives — like a $15,000 signing bonus for officers who come from other police departments — as well as others, like getting rid of the no-beard rule for officers and keeping up with upgrades to vehicles and the police station.
Webber said competing with the state is enough of a challenge, but vying for workers like engineers against the private sector can be a losing battle.
Once prospective candidates see the total package of culture and benefits the city can offer, though, Webber said Santa Fe is “a very attractive place to work.”