Council: Can we get by with fewer employees?

By Charles Sercombe
In the ongoing look at the city’s upcoming budget year, some city councilmembers have been questioning whether the city can get by without filling vacant positions in city hall.
They aren’t talking about police and firefighters, but those working behind the scenes in city hall.
“Can we revisit those areas where we don’t have staffing (but) we still survived well?” said Muhith Mahmood, who was recently appointed to the council to fill a vacancy, and who is proving to be the most vocal on the topic of city employee position vacancies.
The reason he might have asked what he did is the fact the city is considering a non-deficit spending budget for the coming year – an anomaly for recent years.
City Manager Max Garbarino and City Controller Syed Aamir Ahsan insisted that, basically, the answer is ‘No.’
“I wouldn’t say we survived well with it,” Garbarino said. “We skimmed by, but that’s not good. You can only do that for so long before city services start hurting. Things start getting missed, people make mistakes, everything goes wrong.”
In fact, it was stressed — over and over –that the city is losing money, and possibly grants, because there are not enough employees to handle the never-ending paperwork and follow-up that is often required for grants.
One area where the city is understaffed, said Ahsan, is in code enforcement, which he said brings in more money via fines than what it costs to run the department.
Additional personnel, he said, would bring in even more revenue, and put less stress on the current employees too.
So why is there a shortage of personnel?
It likely started with the pandemic, which cut into the budgets of many cities due to lost revenue from tax collections.
Also, the city doesn’t offer as much money in salaries as other communities.
In other words, people go for higher pay.
Garbarino noted that, in the last three years, the city has gone through three different economic development directors. It got to the point, he said, that the city had to forego applying for some grants because there weren’t enough people in the economic development department to oversee them.
Economic development is the one city function that many agree needs additional support.
Overall, the city’s new fiscal year, which starts July 1, is projected to have a balanced budget, meaning the city will spend just as much money as it receives.
The projected budget is $21 million.
In the meantime, the council continues to examine the upcoming budget.
Posted April 7, 2023