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Hilliard committee reviews engineering reorganization as city engineer retires
Summary
City staff outlined a four-year reorganization of the engineering department to address an impending retirement, aging infrastructure and staffing shortfalls; Letty Schamp will assume city engineer duties and the plan phases new hires and internal promotions through 2028.
The Hilliard City Council Committee of the Whole on March 10 heard a four-year reorganization plan from Community Development staff designed to staff up engineering functions, prioritize asset management and prepare for the impending retirement of longtime city engineer Clark Rausch. Director of Community Development Letty Schamp told the committee she has agreed to assume city engineer duties when Rausch retires.
The reorganization matters, staff said, because much of Hilliard’s infrastructure dates to growth spurts in the late 1980s through the early 2000s and now is reaching the end of its useful life. Schamp and other staff described shrinking engineering headcount over recent years and stressed that stronger succession planning and dedicated asset-management work are needed to avoid surprise failures of underground infrastructure.
“Clark Rausch announcing his retirement at the April” prompted the proposed changes, a staff member who introduced the topic said. Schamp, citing her decades of local experience, said she and Rausch have been colleagues for more than 25 years and that she recognizes she has “huge shoes to fill.” She urged the council that the organization should not be contingent on any one individual and described efforts to capture institutional knowledge and formalize procedures.
Staff outlined key elements of the plan: create two divisions under an engineering umbrella (Transportation and Mobility; Development and Utilities), establish deputy city engineer roles to manage each division, and use a mix of internal promotions and phased hires over four years to reach a target departmental size. The plan as presented keeps the department at its current authorized staffing level in 2025 and phases three new hires and promotions in subsequent years:
- 2025: hire one traffic and safety engineer (responsible for safety studies, signal review, traffic calming, parking complaints and related traffic-engineering duties). - 2026: hire a development utilities project engineer to backfill current project-review duties and take on standalone utility rehabilitation work (sanitary-sewer rehabilitation, water-line projects). - 2027: hire a deputy city engineer for the Transportation and Mobility division, bringing the department to a planned total of 12 staff. - 2028: planned city engineer vacancy (Schamp stated 2028 is her planned retirement year), with prior hires and succession steps intended to make that transition seamless.
Schamp described the department’s functions as planning, designing and building capital projects (streets, water, sewers, sidewalks, traffic signals, trails), reviewing developer-initiated projects, enforcing federal, state and local infrastructure regulations, and responding to resident requests. She emphasized the need for a stronger asset-management program — inventorying, inspecting and scheduling maintenance for buried or hidden assets — to reduce the risk of unanticipated failures. Schamp illustrated the point by describing a recent site visit where staff discovered erosion and a hole beneath a roadway culvert that was repaired before a larger failure occurred.
The reorganization includes an internal promotion: Jeff Cox, currently a project engineer on the development and utilities side, would be promoted to deputy city engineer over Development and Utilities and continue some day-to-day plan review during a transition. Staff said the promotion and hires are intended to create advancement opportunities to retain technical staff in a tight labor market.
Councilmembers asked about pay-band increases tied to related ordinance language later on the agenda. Schamp and a staff member said the pay-band adjustments are intended to make Hilliard more competitive with other public employers and the private sector for engineering candidates; specific salary amounts and the ordinance text were not discussed in detail at this meeting.
No formal council action was taken on the reorganization during the Committee of the Whole discussion; staff said legislation addressing titles and positions would appear later on the council agenda. The committee did approve the minutes of the Jan. 13, 2025 Committee of the Whole meeting and later voted to adjourn, both by voice vote with no roll-call tallies provided on the record.
Votes at a glance: - Approval of Committee of the Whole minutes (Jan. 13, 2025): approved as submitted; mover/second not specified in transcript; tally not specified. - Motion to adjourn: approved by voice vote; mover/second not specified in transcript; tally not specified.
The reorganization presentation closed with staff offering to answer questions; no substantive changes to the plan were adopted during this committee discussion. Staff said the proposed hires are budgeted to be phased to reduce immediate operating impacts and to allow time for recruitment and adjustment.
What’s next: staff indicated related legislation on pay bands, position titles and appointments would appear later in the council’s meeting packet; hiring and implementation timelines will depend on recruitment outcomes and future budget approvals.
