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Committee flags finance staffing shortfalls, backlogs and possible outsourcing options
Summary
Committee members questioned finance staff about a two‑plus year accountant vacancy, backlogs in service certifications and financial reporting, and whether the city should consider private firms or shared services while recruitment remains difficult.
During the second portion of the meeting committee members turned to finance operations, staffing and backlog issues.
A finance staff member (identified in the discussion as David) described an extended vacancy for an accountant role and broad hiring challenges in municipal accounting. He told the committee accounting graduates and firms are hiring aggressively and municipal employers face a tight market; accounting positions have been hard to fill and some functions are falling behind as a result.
The committee discussed the backlog of service‑time calculations and pension/retirement service certifications. Jamie (HR staff member) described how some payroll/service‑time statistics could not be calculated correctly by the payroll system and that staff have been doing some reporting by hand.
Committee members asked whether the city should hire a private firm to fill gaps or pursue shared‑service agreements with neighboring municipalities. The finance presenter said outsourcing is a potential option depending on how internal improvements proceed, and warned it would likely increase costs compared with in‑house staff.
The committee also reviewed the city’s asset‑ and fleet‑management systems and heard that Tyler Technologies is expected to address several existing inefficiencies if fully implemented; at the same time, members expressed concern about putting “all our eggs in one basket” after prior problems with the UKG rollout. One finance presenter remarked that certain workarounds produce substantial manual data effort — for example, the city imports an Excel file of roughly 4,000 lines of data for some processes and maintains electronic records back to February 2006.
Nut graf: The finance discussion focused on whether the city can recruit and retain qualified accounting staff quickly enough to clear compliance‑sensitive backlogs and whether short‑term outsourcing or shared services should be considered; staff cited national hiring pressures in accounting and said costs and implementation timelines for firm support or Tyler deployment remain to be clarified.
Ending: The committee asked staff to provide more detailed cost estimates and a timeline for hiring or outsourcing options, and scheduled follow‑up presentations from other departments in coming months.
