Employing more than 10,000 full- and part-time workers, the City and County of Honolulu continues to seek new ways to fill many of its unfilled jobs.

It does so as city workforce vacancies remain at roughly the same level as they did in 2023.

“The city has approximately 8,200 filled and 2,500 vacant civil service positions,” Scott Humber, the mayor’s communications director, told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser.

The greatest number of vacancies can be found within the city’s largest departments, including the Department of Environmental Services, which handles wastewater and sewers to garbage collection, as well as the Department of Facilities Maintenance, which maintains the city’s roads, bridges and public buildings as well as street lights and public electrical systems, he said.

Unfilled jobs also affect the city’s prime public safety agency.

Since early January the Honolulu Police Department — authorized to have 2,100 sworn police officers — states there are 425 vacant positions within its uniformed and sworn-officer ranks. HPD currently staffs a force of about 1,750 sworn officers, police say.

Humber noted that smaller city departments have fewer than 10 vacancies each.

Among them, the Corporation Counsel, the city’s legal wing; Emergency Management, which prepares the city during disasters and emergencies; the Human Resources division; the Medical Examiner; as well the city-run Royal Hawaiian Band, he said.

To fill vacancies, the city looked to improve how it hires, he said.

“With respect to outreach and branding, the Department of Human Resources has launched a robust social media campaign to enhance and update our visibility through LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter,” Humber said. “While still a work in progress, DHR has partnered with the Department of Budget and Fiscal Services, along with all the other line departments, to identify and implement efficiencies that have so far achieved a 50% reduction in the recruitment and hiring timeline of 181 days as compared to fiscal year 2022.”

He noted that the city has developed “partnerships” with the University of Hawaii, community colleges, other colleges on Oahu, the military, high schools and “other sources of qualified applicants for our jobs.”

Other actions occurred, too.

Among them, the city has the ability to recruit and hire above its minimum salary rate, offers more recruitment and retention incentives, has updated its telecommuting policy and started “a pilot alternate work schedule of four days per week at 10 hours per day,” he said.

In May, DHR Director Nola Miyasaki told the Star- Advertiser that city staffing vacancies remained at 2,500 — a number down from over 3,000 vacancies the year prior. In 2022, Mayor Rick Blangiardi’s administration took measures to quash the six-month wait time it took to fill an average city and county employee position.

Still, Miyasaki cautioned that when it comes to the city’s workforce vacancies, “the numbers are always changing.”

“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,” she said previously.

But others, like the leadership of the state’s largest public-sector labor union, believe issues remain between city pay, city working conditions and city vacancies.

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

He added that his orga­nization — representing about 3,300 city and county employees, whose salaries average about $60,000 a year — experienced many problems associated with vacancies and understaffing, particularly at HPD, where Perreira’s union represents 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 previously. “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.

Meanwhile, HGEA criticized the Honolulu Salary Commission’s controversial April adoption of the city’s salary schedule for the 2024 fiscal year, where new raises were granted to the city’s top elected and appointed officials after not receiving any pay hikes over the prior three years.

Those pay raises took effect July 1.

Consequently, the mayor’s annual salary rose nearly 12.6% to $209,856 from its prior $186,432, while an individual Honolulu City Council member’s salary received a 64.4% pay bump to $113,304, up from $68,904.

Only three on the nine- member Council — Radiant Cordero, Augie Tulba and Andria Tupola — formally rejected their own pay hikes.

But news of the Council and mayoral administration pay raises garnered strong feedback from HGEA members.

Perreira said many in his union were upset when comparisons were “made by some of the elected officials suggesting that increases for them are justified because of pay increases to our professional (Bargaining Unit 13),” which represents the bulk of unionized professional and scientific employees in the city as well as the state.

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, he said that it “just doesn’t jibe with a 60% increase that the elected people” received.