Healey’s hiring cooldown off to bad start: $14.2M added to Massachusetts public payroll

Nearly 200 employees joined the ranks of Gov. Maura Healey’s administration in the month after strict hiring measures were put into place across the executive branch to control costs amid flailing state revenues, according to a publicly available database.

The 199 workers who started their jobs between April 4 and April 28 collectively added more than $14.2 million to the $3 billion state payroll through yearly salaries alone with the highest-paid worker, a chief nursing officer at the Department of Public Health, taking home $159,120, a Herald analysis of state records shows.

The top five new hires, including the DPH nursing officer, make at least $134,515 a year, according to state records. Those hires also work in the Executive Office of Health and Human Services and the Department of Transportation.

A spokesperson for Healey’s budget-writing office said the 199 hires included positions for which job offers were made before the hiring measures took effect on April 3.

“It was always assumed and communicated that hiring would continue during this period through exempt positions and waivers for critical needs. We will continue to evaluate the state’s fiscal needs and make determinations about hiring and whether the timeline needs to be extended as we approach the end of June based on revenue collections, year-end spending, and other fiscal conditions,” the spokesperson said in a statement to the Herald.

The database covers new hires for externally posted positions and does not include internal promotions or lateral transfers within an agency, according to the Office of the Comptroller. The data does not reference any offers of employment that have been extended by the Healey administration but not yet made official.

Some offers of employment that have been publicly announced over the past month also do not appear in the database, which is organized by effective date of hire.

The list, for example, appears not to feature Alison Brizius, who was appointed last month by Energy and Environmental Affairs Secretary Rebecca Tepper to serve as the director of the Office of Coastal Zone Management.

Brizius, who starts in the role on May 6 and will earn a $155,000 yearly salary, accepted a job offer on March 26, according to a spokesperson for the Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs.

Healey restricted the autonomy of executive branch agencies and departments to seek new employees last month without sign-off from her budget office. The move came in the face of struggling revenues and skyrocketing state-run shelter costs, two factors that have put pressure on Beacon Hill to rein in spending.

The immediate pause on hiring took effect April 3 and is initially scheduled to run through the end of June, according to a memo from the state’s interim chief human resources officer, Melissa Pullin. Hires, rehires, or transfers into the executive department are “permitted only where affordable within existing payroll caps,” the memo said.

But there is a lengthy list of positions across the executive branch that are exempted from needing sign-off from the state’s budget office, including seasonal hires, positions that are required to be filled by a court order or settlement agreement, returns from leave, and offers made before April 3.

Officials were asked to remove job postings that were not exempted and notify “applicants that the job opening has been temporarily suspended due to fiscal constraints,” according to the memo. Agencies had until April 16 at 5 p.m. to submit a waiver to hire new employees.

The spokesperson for the Executive Office of Administration and Finance said 176 waivers have been approved by the office, largely for full-time employees and positions that were posted before the hiring rules started.

Some 216 job postings for a total of 240 open positions were removed as of April 26, the spokesperson said. Job postings for which waivers were sought have not been removed, according to the spokesperson.

About a fifth of the workers who started a job in the Healey administration between April 4 and 28 joined the Department of Conservation and Recreation. A number of those employees were filling seasonal roles like temporary firefighters, greenskeepers, or conservation biologists, among others.

The Department of Conservation and Recreation alone added roughly $2.2 million to the state’s payroll, according to an analysis of the Office of the Comptroller’s database. Only a handful of new employees at the agency were permanent hires, the data showed.

A spokesperson for the Department of Conservation and Recreation said the agency largely operates on a seasonal basis, with spring through fall considered the busiest time millions are welcomed to parks, campgrounds, beaches, and pools.

The agency typically hires roughly 2,000 summer seasonal staff of which 700 to 800 are lifeguards and waterfront and pool staff, the spokesperson said in a statement.

The database also shows that the vast majority of new workers who joined the administration last month started their jobs between April 4 and April 9. Only three people started work in April after those dates, all of them at the Department of Developmental Services, according to the database.

Only one employee on the list who started work on April 7 at the Department of Developmental Services as a direct care worker had a reference letter from an elected state official, according to the data.