Delray Beach Human Resources requests $1.3M, flags rising health-insurance costs

Human Resources Director Duane Deandre presented the department’s 2025-26 budget request Tuesday, outlining personnel levels, benefits programs and rising health-insurance costs that are driving fund requests across the city.

“We have a current employee count of 991 employees,” Duane Deandre said. He described Human Resources as a full-service operation covering recruitment, labor relations, learning and development, compensation and benefits, risk management and more; he said HR’s slide deck shows 14 HR employees distributed across HR, health insurance and risk insurance budgets.

Deandre said the HR operating request totals $1,300,000, a 6.3% increase from last year’s amended budget; the change was largely a $79,000 difference in personnel services for insurance and merit increases. On the city’s health-insurance fund, Deandre said the request is $20,400,000, a 2.4% increase from an amended $19.85 million the prior year, a difference he gave as $486,083. He described the risk management division as covering property, liability and workers’ compensation; the presentation shows a net difference in that fund of $163,269 with business-insurance costs noted.

Deandre described the department’s requested level-of-service changes as a reallocation of the benefits manager to a higher grade and reclassification of a benefits specialist to a benefits generalist. “This is the only level of service increases that we asked for,” he told the commission.

Commissioner Burns asked whether the HR increase translates into employee salary increases; Deandre replied that merit and salary increases for departmental staff are included in the budgets of individual departments and are not handled solely within the central HR request.

No formal action was taken at the workshop; the HR presentation will be considered as part of the city’s broader budget review schedule.