ST. LOUIS — Aldermen got more bad news about the city’s hiring woes Wednesday, prompting some to suggest cutting empty jobs to pay existing employees more.
Personnel Director Sonia Jenkins-Gray kicked off a committee hearing with another discouraging spreadsheet: 1,774 positions, it said, or 30% of the city workforce, are empty.
Hundreds of workers are missing across the police, fire, water and jail departments. Divisions responsible for parks, trash pickup and traffic control are struggling, too.
The city’s hiring woes have been well-publicized in recent years. They have been blamed for problems with picking up trash and recycling, getting ambulances to emergencies, towing derelict vehicles, trimming dead trees, and properly staffing police districts. Officials have responded with multiple across-the-board raises, and some larger increases for certain employees. But aside from some success with hiring back 911 dispatchers, progress has been slow going.
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Jenkins-Gray said her department, which has been accused of moving too slowly to hire new people, is doing what it can to improve the situation. It has amped up recruiting for key positions. And it’s about to install new human resources software that should smooth some bumps in the hiring process.
But she said it’s still struggling with department directors who take a while to do their part of the process. It can still take weeks to respond to applicants and months to hire them. And even when the city gets a bunch of good candidates ready to go, departments don’t always have the capacity to train them all.
Jenkins-Gray said her department is understaffed, too: It has just six recruiters juggling workloads roughly twice what they should be. She said that’s not even enough to fill all the positions deemed priorities, like police officers, jail guards and tree trimmers.
Hearing all that, Alderwoman Alisha Sonnier, of Tower Grove East, asked if some departments might be better off just cutting some positions. Other officials, including Mayor Tishaura O. Jones, have said that even when the city can hire people to be police officers and truck drivers, they struggle to keep them because other cities or private businesses offer more money for their skills.
Maybe, Sonnier said, some of the money budgeted for people the city can’t hire could help with that.
“Maybe you can’t have 100 people, but you can have 70 folks that are paid extremely well, and you can keep the people you get,” she said.
Alderman Rasheen Aldridge, of Downtown, had the same idea.
“How do we turn some of those vacancies into pay increases for folks?” he asked.
Jenkins-Gray said she’s had the same thought.
“I think that would be a valuable conversation to have,” she said.
Post-Dispatch photographers selected some of their photos from January 2024. Video edited by Jenna Jones.
