The city of Tucson is facing significant staffing vacancies in departments that provide crucial services ranging from park maintenance to 911 assistance.
The issues aren’t new, or exclusive to Tucson, but they are severe in some of the city’s departments:
More than a third of positions are vacant at the Parks and Recreation Department and the Public Safety Communications Department — where Tucson’s 911 operators work.
About a fifth of the positions in Information Technology and the General Services Department are unfilled.
12% of the Tucson Police Department’s positions are either vacant or occupied by trainees who can’t be sent out to work in the community yet.
City officials said the shortages have been ongoing for years and are driven by a variety of factors including a lack of qualified candidates, which is a problem across the country, and difficulty getting the word out about open positions. The city has a workforce of about 3,300 positions.
Understaffed city departments have turned to alternative methods to fill gaps in service — like having existing employees pick up the slack or hiring contractors — which aren’t always effective where staffing is needed most.
The impact on residents can be as serious as not getting timely help during an emergency. The Public Safety Communications Department’s overstretched staff, for example, struggles to answer 911 calls fast enough to meet the national standard.
“If we are not fast on those true emergent calls, the outcomes are pretty bad,” said Sharon McDonough, the interim director of the department. “There’s a victim on the other end of that line who’s not getting the help they need.”
A new plan to address the issue was proposed by City Manager Michael Ortega last week that would center around identifying hard-to-fill positions, and developing a strategy to more effectively market and recruit for those open jobs.
But the untested plan also threatens to take funding away from an earlier strategy that’s being used to keep the shortage from getting worse.
Filling difficult positions
The first part of Ortega’s plan is to reorganize empty positions based on whether a city department has been looking for candidates to fill them.
Positions that haven’t been actively recruited for more than a year will be moved out of their departments and “parked” in a general government category. The city will discuss funding those positions in next year’s budget, and some might be eliminated.
The second and most central piece of the proposed plan is to identify “hard-to-fill” positions and take a more involved approach to filling them.
Open jobs will be considered hard-to-fill after two failed attempts by the department to recruit a candidate for the positions, which often exist in specialized areas — including communications and law enforcement, as well as IT — where city officials said they’ve had trouble finding qualified candidates.
“Trying to find skilled positions is just becoming more of a challenge,” said Pat Tapia, the deputy director of the Environmental and General Services Department. “This has been going on for years. The staffing was actually even pre-COVID, you were starting to see within our industry that staffing was just becoming more and more tough to fill positions.”
The City Manager’s Office will work with the department directors to nail-down why they’ve been unsuccessful, which will involve reviewing things like the required qualifications, the interview process and how the position was marketed.
City officials also said they’re using a consultant who will help develop recruitment strategies and assist city staff in advertising the position so candidates know it’s available, which is another issue that has made filling vacancies difficult.
George Garcia with Tucson Parks and Recreation power-washes debris from the walkways around the pond at Reid Park. Park maintenance is one of the crucial areas in which the city is facing significant staffing vacancies.
“We are working directly with the departments, we’re working with outside vendors as well on recruitments,” Ortega said during Tuesday’s coucil meeting. “It really is a more holistic view of the need for us to put emphasis on that future chemistry, that future environment, which we can then sell on the open market for people to want to stay here and want to work for us.”
Other possible changes include speeding up the long hiring process, which can cause the city to lose candidates to private sector competitors, according to officials.
Pay raises have helped
City officials raised the salaries of existing workers earlier this year in order to make the pay more competitive, an action that brought salaries for positions like communications staff and police officers up to a market-level.
McDonough credits the pay raise for her department’s vacancy rate decrease, which dropped from 45% to 34% in just a few months.
“One of the factors was the pay,” said McDonough. “We were well below market and that was corrected early this year and we’re now at a more marketable pay structure and scale to be an attractive job option.”
Those pay increases were funded by dollars the city saved by not filling vacant positions, however.
The strategy was designed to retain employees or fill recent vacancies by making the position more appealing, not necessarily to address the issue on a broader scale that would lead to full staffing.
“What that does is it basically precludes me from being fully staffed within the current budget,” Ortega said. “That sounds like a negative, but it actually isn’t. It’s a more efficient use of dollars.”
Pay raises are an efficient use of extra money that isn’t being used to fund unfilled positions, but that multimillion dollar surplus will no longer be available if officials succeed in fully staffing their offices.
The new plan presents the possibility that officials will have to choose between pay raises for employees — a solution that has been necessary to maintain staff levels — and being able to fund the positions needed to fully staff government offices.
Despite the conflict, Ortega said there’s funding flexibility that will allow officials to deal with the issue if it arises.
“It would be a challenge, but if it does happen I built in a safety net within the budget,” Ortega said. “I’ve actually made assumptions about that in a very conservative manner to say, ‘look, if we’re able to fill these positions here are strategies for how we fund those market adjustments.’”
Managing shortages
For now, understaffed departments need to continue providing crucial services despite the lack of permanent staff to carry out every office function.
Department directors have employed different strategies to keep their offices above water, including the use of overtime and other staffing models that require existing employees to fill gaps in service.
The strategy can help get the job done when necessary, but McDonough said it can leave employees burned out and even cause some to leave because of the intense workload.
“We’re happy when we can get enough bodies to fill the seats to have critical staffing complete, but what that means is our employees can’t get vacation time, their breaks are shorter and it’s just pressure all day long,” she said. “There’s no good down time, which then contributes to that vicious cycle of I’m going to resign because my job is too hard.”
McDonough has also used temporary workers, or contractors, to fill vacancy-related gaps. She said temps have provided “great” service and answered thousands of 911 calls during her time as the interim director. Still, contractors come with their own set of problems depending on the situation. They can be expensive, lack familiarity with the work environment and are unable to fill the service needs in certain departments.
The police department, for example, can’t hire temporary workers to make up for it’s shortage of sworn officers, which is about 12% when trainees who can’t be deployed in the community are taken into account. As of mid-September, 78 officers had already left the police force this year, and the department’s monthly rate of loss is on track to be about 50% higher than usual. Department officials could not be reached to explain the loss of officers.
Given the lack of qualified candidates that’s driving some of the shortages, those recent vacancies could be difficult to fill until the broader issue is addressed.
“There just aren’t enough people out there that have the skillsets or the personalities to do those jobs,” Ortega said about a lack of qualified candidates for departments like police.
Photos: Congress Street scenes, Tucson, ca. 1950s
Street scenes, Tucson, 1950s
Updated
People on the sidewalk on Congress Street at or near Scott Avenue in Tucson, ca. 1950s.
Street scenes, Tucson, 1950s
Updated
People on the sidewalk on Congress Street at or near Scott Avenue in Tucson, ca. 1950s.
Street scenes, Tucson, 1950s
Updated
People on the sidewalk on Congress Street at or near Scott Avenue in Tucson, ca. 1950s.
Street scenes, Tucson, 1950s
Updated
People on the sidewalk on Congress Street at or near Scott Avenue in Tucson, ca. 1950s.
Street scenes, Tucson, 1950s
Updated
People on the sidewalk on Congress Street at or near Scott Avenue in Tucson, ca. 1950s.
Street scenes, Tucson, 1950s
Updated
People on the sidewalk on Congress Street at or near Scott Avenue in Tucson, ca. 1950s.
Street scenes, Tucson, 1950s
Updated
People on the sidewalk on Congress Street at or near Scott Avenue in Tucson, ca. 1950s.
Street scenes, Tucson, 1950s
Updated
People on the sidewalk on Congress Street at or near Scott Avenue in Tucson, ca. 1950s.
Street scenes, Tucson, 1950s
Updated
People on the sidewalk on Congress Street at or near Scott Avenue in Tucson, ca. 1950s.
Street scenes, Tucson, 1950s
Updated
People on the sidewalk on Congress Street at or near Scott Avenue in Tucson, ca. 1950s.
Street scenes, Tucson, 1950s
Updated
People on the sidewalk on Congress Street at or near Scott Avenue in Tucson, ca. 1950s.
Street scenes, Tucson, 1950s
Updated
The only information on a package of negatives from the Tucson Citizen photo archives. Inside were pictures of Congress Street at or near Scott Avenue in Tucson, ca. 1950s.
