7.2. SR 06-07-2010 - Laserfiche WebLink

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Item # 7.2. liver MEMORANDUM TO: Mayor and City Council FROM: Lori Johnson, City Administrator DATE: June 7, 2010 SUBJECT: Discuss Staffing/Personnel Items At Monday's meeting I will be prepared to discuss with the Council a plan for addressing the vacant department head positions. In addition, I am bringing forward a proposal for Council consideration that would help alleviate the difficulty that the elimination of overtime and mandatory use of compensatory time have created. The first and most important item is determining how to proceed with the open department head positions. It takes a minimum of three to four months to fill a department head position; therefore, making a decision soon is critical to getting someone hired before the end of the year. These department head positions are important leadership roles that provide decision making, guidance, and policy direction to departments to improve our delivery of services and to provide creative and efficient, economical solutions to the difficult decisions that axe ongoing with the severely limited budgets under which we all function. Unfortunately, our budget situation does not allow us to fill all department head positions at this time. However, assuming that there are no additional revenue reductions in 2011, which is reasonable because there is no longer any state aid included in the budget, two of the positions can be filled within the existing budget. In addition, if the positions are filled at an entry level, there will be a budget savings of around $15,000 fox each position. Second, there were several steps the Council has had to take to balance the budget that have affected staff and staffs ability to provide the same level of service as in the past. One such item is the elimination of overtime fox all employees except police public safety response and the overtime required to be paid by policy or contract. Employees are still required to put in extra hours, but those hours must be taken as compensatory time off. This places an additional burden on affected departments because in many cases their staff has already been reduced and now there are fewer employee hours available to do the work because of the requirement to take compensatory time off in lieu of pay. One way to ease this burden without affecting the budget is to allow additional vacation carry over for non-union employees and union employees whose contract does not contain specific vacation carry over language. Currently, employees axe allowed to carry over as much vacation as they can