‘Crisis’: Dallas has more than 3,400 vacancies on city staff

The city of Dallas is facing a staffing crisis, with 20% of its jobs unfilled — more than 3,400 vacancies — even as peer cities in Texas are having some success filling open positions after the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Current staff vacancy rates appear to be the new normal post-pandemic,” Dallas Human Resources Director Nina Arias said in a statement. “The long-term impact of the current vacancy crisis is unclear. However, it is clear businesses and organizations like the City of Dallas need to find creative ways to attract and retain qualified workers,” Arias said in a statement.

Meanwhile, other Texas cities, most of which have markedly lower vacancy rates than Dallas, according to data provided to The Dallas Morning News, said they expect staffing levels to improve.

In Austin, the city is missing 14% of its staff. In San Antonio, that number is about 10%. And in nearby Plano and Arlington, the staff vacancy rates are 6.5%. and 9.0%, respectively. Of the state’s largest cities, only Houston has a staff vacancy rate higher than Dallas, at 22%.

“Despite challenging times, we are seeing our vacancy rate move toward pre-pandemic levels,” said Brandis Davis, a spokesman for San Antonio’s human resources department.

Arias couldn’t say the same for Dallas’s more than 17,088 total positions, of which 13,617 are filled as of July 31.

Despite HR doing “everything” it can to attract and retain workers – such as fighting for higher wages, increasing benefits, and even launching campaigns to boost the public’s perception of city jobs – the new staffing shortages are the new status quo, Arias said.

The city blamed the staffing deficit on a slew of obstacles:fewer applicants, outdated onboarding software, a lack of candidates with technical skill and a burgeoning private sector.

“When you get to a figure as high as 20%, you have significant inefficiency,” said Lee Adler, a professor at Cornell University’s school of Industrial and Labor Relations.

That might mean fewer garbage truck drivers or landfill workers, straining the city’s ability to pick up trash and deal with it appropriately; fewer parks and recreation workers, reducing the number of in-person fitness classes; fewer city communications staff; and an overall reduction of city services that causes “considerable grumbling from the citizenry who don’t feel like they’re getting any kind of bang for their buck,” Adler said.

The city in June announced many calls related to minor crimes would have to be filed online due to climbing police response times and worsening staffing shortages. Currently, the Dallas Police Department has the highest number of vacancies of any city department, with 932 unfilled jobs. In July, The News reported that five months after its city attorney retired, Dallas still had not interviewed candidates, chosen a search firm or posted the job opening for what is one of the top positions in the city.

Inside the numbers

Staffing numbers change every month and can be skewed by seasonal workers, interns and grant-funded positions. For instance, city data from January showed some Dallas departments had more vacant positions than filled ones. Human resources was missing 69 workers and 53% of staff in early January. Dallas Park & Recreation was missing 904 workers with a 58% vacancy rate and the Dallas Office of Cultural Arts had 46 jobs unfilled, 49% of the department, the same January dataset showed.

City data provided to The News shows the park and recreation department, the water utilities department and fire and police department each had over 400 vacant positions on July 31. The Housing & Neighborhood revitalization department has the highest vacancy rate, with 46% of jobs unfilled.

Before providing The News with data, the city repeatedly declined requests for current citywide and department-by-department staffing data. It partly blamed the staffing shortage.

“My department has been sub-optimally performing due to illness and turnover over the past few weeks,” said Catherine Cuellar, the city’s communications director.

Cuellar denied requests to make department heads available for interviews about how the staffing shortage is affecting departments. She again blamed this on the shortage.

“You’ve asked for interviews and the interviews have been declined because of their availability to speak to you relative to their availability running their department,” Cuellar told The News. “That’s an indication of their staffing levels — not doing interviews, because they’re running their departments.”

Some of those departments have had especially difficult challenges when it comes to hiring. In Dallas, the city’s police, fire and technical positions – engineers, electricians, plumbers – and other tradesmen are among the jobs that are most difficult to fill, according to City Manager T.C. Broadnax.

“Ensuring we have the right talent is crucial for the success and growth of our city,” Broadnax said. “We continue to work on developing strategies to recruit and retain sustainable talent short and long term.”

Texas’ biggest cities had different answers when asked which jobs were the hardest to fill, but all are having trouble recruiting technical positions. San Antonio said it has a shortage of veterinarians, IT professionals and engineers. Austin is struggling to find airport workers, STEM positions and telecommunications. In Houston, it’s health and public safety, public works and waste collections.

For Dallas, the shortage of workers is so bad that city departments sometimes poach workers from one another. In one instance, city departments had an “interdepartmental battle” over employees with commercial driver’s licenses, Arias said.

“You can’t change what a CDL holder gets paid between aviation and water because whoever’s paying more, all the drivers are going to jump from one department to the other,” Arias said. “And then if the other department raises it, everyone will jump back.”

Labor and business experts said Dallas’s high vacancy rate, as with any organization, will cripple the city eventually unless corrected.

“It becomes a dysfunctional spiral over time because the people who work there (are) faced with doing more with less, and the incentives to encourage that kind of overload get reinforced,” said David Lei, a professor at Southern Methodist University’s Cox School of Business who studies corporate strategy and organizational evolution.

“When people do leave, it has a reputational effect that this is going to be a pretty tough place to work and there’s not going to be that much support,” Lei said.

Apples to apples comparison?

Arias says while Dallas has a higher percentage of unfilled jobs than most of its aforementioned counterparts, the city has a lower turnover rate than the state as a whole. Dallas, she said, had an aggregate turnover rate of 13.6% last year, while Texas was at 22.7%. The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ national average was 20.9%.

But the same federal survey – the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey – shows the industry vacancy rate for state and local governments, excluding education, across the country is 6.6%, according to data from June. That’s more than three times higher than Dallas’s 20% vacancy, also as of June.

Arias said the reason the city’s vacancy rate is comparably poorer than Austin, San Antonio and the nationwide industry rate has more to do with the way other jurisdictions measure vacancies and less to do with problems with the City of Dallas. For instance, some cities might measure numbers of interns or seasonal workers differently than Dallas, she said.

“I trust these are professional people that know what they’re saying and what they’re doing,” Arias said when told of Austin and San Antonio’s vacancy rate. “But whenever we do a study and try to get data across all of us, we’re all doing things so differently, measuring things so differently, that getting to the apples to apples is very difficult”

Dallas’s staffing shortage is made worse by North Texas’ political geography. The high concentration of jurisdictions in the metroplex makes leaving Dallas for one of the other 200-plus cities an easy move for city workers looking to boost compensation or elevate their job title.

Arias said she lost her compensation manager, whom she spent years grooming and training, to Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport.

“Retention is a dynamic challenge because once you’ve worked here, people want to hire you elsewhere,” Cuellar said.

Despite the different vacancy rates, the cost of living in other large metros such as Houston, San Antonio, Austin and Dallas are around the same.

According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s cost of living calculator, an individual would need to earn $48,239 to cover basic needs for themselves and a two-year-old child in Dallas County. In Bexar County, where San Antonio is, it’s $48,605; in Harris County (Houston) it’s $50,297; in Travis County (Austin) it’s $55,538.

Each of the cities also recently raised its minimum wage for city employees. In Dallas, budget plans include increasing the minimum wage to $18.50 an hour, or roughly $38,480 a year for a full-time employee, this upcoming fiscal year.

Recruitment problems

While Dallas City Hall has thousands of open jobs, the city has only posted 178 online. Cuellar says the relatively few postings can be explained by “summer-only” positions, online postings that represent more than one position with the same job description or jobs where the city has informally chosen a candidate but the onboarding process hasn’t started yet.

The city’s onboarding process uses NeoGov software that is at least 12 years old. The city is in the process of moving onboarding to a system called Workday.

Over the last three years, the number of applicants cities receive for each job opening has plummeted, according to a study from governmentjobs.com referenced by the city. Arias says candidates that do apply are less qualified now. To make matters worse, candidates are also more likely to “ghost” the city after submitting an application or being offered a job. Other employees use the city’s offer to negotiate a better deal elsewhere.

Marcus Butts, the chair of the Management and Organizations Department at Cox, said booming private companies around Dallas have likely lured local workers away from government jobs. The public sector, particularly after COVID, doesn’t afford its employees the flexibility, wages or ability to shape organizational direction that they might find in the private sector, he said.

“We will never be competitive with the private sector,” Cuellar said. “I have people making five figures in my department who’ve gone on to make six figures in the private sector, and I’m like, ‘Bless you, thank you for your time here, thank you for your service. And hire me someday,’” Cuellar said.

The biggest issue in attracting and keeping city workers is that the public has a negative view of government jobs, according to Cuellar and Arias.

“All of us are doing more than full-time work for less than market pay,” said Cuellar, who earned about $160,000 last year. “That’s why for talent attraction, it has to be a cultural fit of people who are ‘Dallas blue’ on the inside.”

Cuellar promised the city will soon be launching a “talent attraction campaign” to make Dallas the “premier public sector, municipal employer in the state of Texas.” The money for that will be approved in the upcoming budget vote in City Council.

To really fight the staffing shortage, the city will also have to raise its compensation packages, said Arias, who last year brought in around $190,000. But Arias and Cuellar said their immediate efforts are about improving Dallas’s brand.

“People say to me and to my staff, you must not be very smart or you wouldn’t work in government,” Cuellar said.

Unexpected effects from the pandemic have also punctured morale. The “great resignation,” the increasing demand for a semi-remote workplace and a wave of retirements during COVID have left many highly experienced positions vacant and created a dearth of institutional knowledge within City Hall.

For the meantime, Adler, the Cornell professor, warned the severe shortages will slowly erode any faith or confidence Dallasites have in their local government.

“These shortfalls have got to be corrected, because otherwise, the impact in the short run will be a lot of aggravation,” Adler said. “But in the long run it can really damage people’s belief that we can collectively solve any problems.”