The meeting will come to order.

Welcome to business session.

Our first item is approval of minutes for the business session of October 6th, 2022.

Is there a motion to approve?

Summold.

Second.

Been moved and seconded.

All in favor indicate by saying aye.

Aye.

Aye.

All opposed.

Okay.

So the motion passes.

I want to give uh props to Councilwoman Robinson for holding down the low numbered districts.

We appreciate you on your side.

I might move over there soon.

All right, presentation regarding open staff positions.

Well, good afternoon, mayor, members of the council, Terry Casey, Human Resources Director, and with me is Tammy Queen, Director of Finance, and we are going to present on information on the city position vacancies, a little bit of information about the hiring process, and the right sizing initiative.

So just want to start off with information, just the background information, which is no surprise to anyone.

Talk about the problems that organizations are having competing for talent.

And so the city of Kansas City is not exempt from those all those practices, too.

And according to study by the US Department of Labor, 48 million employees voluntarily left their jobs in 2021.

So again, it's not just us, it's it's happening all over.

So how did we as a city arrived where we're at?

That great resignation is one factor.

Um that impacts the job market, the job markets, there are positions available.

You can go anywhere, see now hiring help wanted signs.

So employees have options, and they are looking at different pay options, competitive pay, different benefits, flexible benefits, the ability to telework.

So these are things that we as a city are also addressing.

And then we've also had periods uh below market pay for our city employees in years where we've had limited raises, two percent raises, or no raises in the last couple of years.

So that also plays into our employees' uh level of job satisfaction morale with the city.

But again, we have been making um impacts on these.

We just had the market pay increase that went into effect August 1st that adjusted our salaries for our city employees.

We've had uh CBA negotiations with all three unions, and we've given them um increases, and then we've also had initiatives like the um administrative regulation that deals with telework, and we've got flexible schedules through our pause uh program.

So those are some of the things that we are looking at.

So where are we?

Um currently there are 5,480, 5,428 positions on the book.

So of those positions, 4,012 are filled, and 1,416 positions are vacant.

Uh this does exclude KCPD and any temporary seasonal positions like our summer lifeguards, rec leaders would not be included in our in our position count.

And so, where does that break down by department?

There is a slide that talks about some of the different departments, the impact on those departments.

Um couple of things that you know, just this slide by itself.

Um, when we talked about this in finance committee, there were some questions about the last time we provide vacancy rates, and that was in February of 2022.

So that's on here.

Um talks about how many positions, the total number of positions a department has, how many vacant positions they had February 2022, and then their current number of vacant positions as of the end of September, and their uh current vacancy rate.

Um this does not include the council and mayor's office, and again, it does not include any of our temporary seasonal positions or limited term positions.

Uh the thing I would like to point out just from human resources, I can give that as an example.

In February of 2022, we had six vacancies, and now it's still showing we have six vacancies.

And so this is why this chart maybe doesn't tell the whole story, because since February 2022, we had six vacancies at that time.

We gained two additional positions in the budget, which would have been eight vacancies.

We've had three people, four people leave our department, which now puts us at 12 vacancies, and we've had six hires.

So we're still right back at six vacancies.

So there's a lot of change going on in human resources isn't unique to that.

That's happening to all the city departments.

And so it's kind of hard to tell a story just by this chart alone and looking at what's happening throughout the city.

One thing I will point out the health department does have the highest rate of vacancies on this chart, but I did talk with Dr.

Jones briefly yesterday, and so a number of these positions are uh were given to the health department during the COVID pandemic, high height of it when they were needing the contract tracers and they don't have actual funding for some of those positions.

She said there's about 60 positions that should not be reflected in here, so that would then reduce what their vacancy rate is.

Additionally, since February 2022, some of the things that wanted to point out, we've had over a thousand, over 1,100 actually, job openings.

Um, the job openings we posted positions internally and externally, so sometimes it might be the same position, so it's not that we've had that many actual job openings they could have posted internally and then also an external uh posting.