To drive down the more than 3,000 vacancies plaguing the ranks of the city’s workforce, Mayor Rick Blangiardi in 2022 sought to quash the six-month wait it took to fill an average City and County of Honolulu employee position.

In August, Blangiardi gave his administration 90 days to cut that time in half.

The fast-tracking effort to recruit, process and retain new workers to the city’s payroll brought results: As of April 30 there are now more than 2,500 vacancies, a 23% vacancy rate for the city’s approximately 11,000-person workforce.

“One of the things about vacancies is the numbers are always changing,” said Nola Miyasaki, director of the city’s Department of Human Resources. “For example, sometimes departments deactivate positions, sometimes they reactivate positions, there are new positions being added with reorganizations, for example, with the Department of Planning and Permitting … so that vacancy number is a fluctuating number from time to time.”

Moreover, Miyasaki said, her department did not record vacancies for some of the other city agencies, including the Office of the City Clerk, the Office of Council Services and the City Council.

“They do their own hiring,” she said, “so although they’re included … the numbers are going to be different depending on who you’re asking and who you’re talking about; there’s no precise number. So, when I’m looking at vacancies from an HR standpoint, I’m looking at civil service and exempt positions that only I am responsible for hiring for the city. So there are a number of other positions outside the purview of DHR.”

Still, the effort to reduce vacancies citywide and streamline its hiring efforts did begin, following the mayor’s directive and the results of a third-party study.

Last summer, Honolulu took part in a Bloomberg-Harvard City Leadership Initiative, in which the city choose to examine its own complex hiring process. As part of the study, the hiring process was broken into three parts: The first step was to get approval to fill the position, which on average took the city about 62 days. The second step was to screen eligible candidates and recruit future workers, which took on average about 49 days. The third step was to interview and select potential workers, which took about 70 days.

On average, the study found it took the city 31 days to even post a new job. The delays in hiring were often the result of differences between individual departments. The report found that on average, delays within individual departments add 94 days to hiring.

“Our goal was to reduce each of those by 50%,” Miyasaki said, noting improvements were made in all three parts the study had examined in 2022. “Stage one process has been reduced by 50%, on a month-to-month average.”

She added that the second stage of external recruitment went to 25 days from 49. “We’ve also hit those numbers for the past four months.”

The third step — to reduce interviewing and selection times to 35 from 70 days — has not been fully achieved.

“It might be at 25% … but we’re going to try to help the departments to get more efficient through a greater use of our technology platform … so I expect that number to improve,” Miyasaki said.

For City Council Chair Tommy Waters, any effort taken by the city to reduce vacancies and to speed hiring to bolster the city’s workforce is worthwhile.

“The city administration is trying — they are holding job fairs for the public, working with universities and colleges, posting job openings on social media, and even trying to expedite the hiring process,” Waters told the Honolulu Star- Advertiser via email. “That said, there are still major barriers.”

Waters stressed that barriers to hiring new city workers included lower pay, job location, shift work and meeting position qualifications.

“Many of the minimum qualifications for even entry-level positions are out of date and unrealistic given the pay. We need to revisit and eliminate where appropriate,” he said. “In addition, retirements create new vacancies on a continuing basis.”

Waters added while every vacancy is critical to how the city delivers services to the public, he’s focused on public safety.

“Our first responders operate around the clock, and the vacancies in HPD are worrisome. There are 385 HPD vacancies, and that number has not been decreasing,” Waters said. “With 122 resignations and 88 service retirements in the last year, I am extremely concerned about how we will ensure proper staffing. As I’ve stated before, a patrolling police officer is one of the best deterrents to crime.”

He added that he appreciated “the work of HPD in increasing the number of recruit classes held each year as well as their continued marketing efforts, and I look forward to working with HPD and the administration to find creative solutions to address these vacancies.”

As far as the 2024 fiscal year budget, Waters said he’s proposed “that we fully fund HPD as they requested,” which is a $40.6 million increase from 2022.

According to HPD, starting pay for a sworn police officer is $79,556 — an amount dependent on collective bargaining agreements.

And in terms of the salaries for those working for the city and county, criticism has surfaced over the Honolulu Salary Commission’s April 25 adoption of the city’s salary schedule for 2024 fiscal year, where new raises would be granted to the city’s top elected and appointed officials. That would see the mayor’s annual salary rise 12.56% to $209,856 from its current $186,432, while an individual Council member’s salary would get a 64.4% pay bump to $113,304, up from $68,904.

The Salary Commission’s adopted pay raises take effect 60 days after adoption unless rejected entirely or in part by a three-quarters vote — or seven votes — of the Council’s entire membership, according to the City Charter. Two Council members — Augie Tulba and Andria Tupola — have since co-introduced resolutions to formally reject the city’s pay hikes.

Waters — whose pay as Council chair would rise to $123,288 from $76,968, a 60.2% jump — asserted such pay raises will benefit the city by attracting future leaders to local government.

“I believe we need to be working to inspire a new generation of leaders to be excited to join public serv­ice and deliver for the community, and we need to be prepared to pay living wages and salaries commensurate with the work, whether it is our civil service staff, appointed positions or elected officials,” he said. “The idea that public servants should make less or take more sacrifices is outdated and holding us back from attracting the best and brightest to the city.”

Regarding the city’s rank-and-file employees, Waters said the Council has approved all collective bargaining agreements that have come up for votes.

“The percentage increase of these agreements vary, with some ranging from 15% to 20% over four years,” he said. “I am also open to continuing to explore ways to ensure that we empower our workforce, and that includes increasing the salary range on positions that have historically been hard to fill. I want to work with all of the public employee unions to ensure that the City and County of Honolulu can be a competitive employer to the private sector.”

For some, including the leadership of the state’s largest public-sector labor union, political rhetoric from the city’s top officials rings hollow with regard to pay, vacancies and working conditions.

“We guesstimate that the vacancy rate for the people that we represent is in the 30% range,” said Randy Perreira, executive director of Hawaii Government Employees Association.

He added that his organization — representing about 3,300 city and county employees, whose salaries average about $60,000 a year — sees many problems associated with vacancies as well as understaffing, particularly at HPD and at DPP as well.

At HPD, Perreira said his union — which currently has more than 2,500 vacancies for positions under HGEA representation — also covers police dispatchers.

“The chronic understaffing and chronic vacancies create a horrendous work environment for people who stick it out and remain on the job,” he said. “They are put in situations where they are forced into overtime. They have to work a lot of overtime to make sure shifts are covered.”

He added that workers’ “quality of life” suffers as a result, as dispatchers can variably work eight- or 12-hour shifts.

“They have to forgo family events, what have you, because they can’t get anybody to cover for them,” Perreira said, adding sometimes police dispatchers must work double shifts. “Simply because there’s nobody else, there’s just not enough people.”

He said though some progress has been made within HPD over pay increases as an incentive to dispatchers, the city has not worked to solve the vacancies issue.

“No, the city has not worked with us,” Perreira said.

And as far as the pending salary increases for some of the city’s top elected and appointed officials, Perreira said news of such raises has garnered strong feedback from HGEA members.

“There certainly has been a reaction,” he said, noting many in the union are upset when “comparisons are made by some of the elected officials suggesting that increases for them are justified because of pay increases to our professional (Bargaining Unit 13).”

Although rank-and-file Unit 13 workers got a 14.3% salary increase as part of a four-year work contract that ends June 30, 2025, Perreira said that it “just doesn’t jibe with a 60% increase that the elected people would see.”