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Franklin HR asks for staff upgrades and expanded leadership training; flags benefits succession in FY28
Summary
Human Resources requested funding for leadership development, an HR generalist, and an upgraded employee-relations supervisor for FY26, and flagged a FY28 need for a benefits manager should long-tenured staff retire. The department highlighted drops in turnover and increases in applicants as measures of progress.
Kevin Townsville, director of human resources, presented the HR department’s FY26 budget and program-enhancement requests on Feb. 6, asking the committee to fund leadership and management development, one HR generalist, and an upgrade of the employee-relations specialist to a supervisory role. He said the department is also flagging a future FY28 request for a benefits manager to address potential retirements among long-tenured staff.
Townsville described a multi-part enhancement request. The leadership and management development initiative includes both in-house and external training (figures cited during the meeting: in-house and contracted training costs; specific dollar totals were shown on presentation slides). The HR generalist request responds to a widening HR workload since the COVID period as the department resumed full operations and expanded responsibilities such as onboarding improvements, compensation-plan completion, a new tuition-reimbursement portal and implementation of the Nectar employee-recognition platform.
Townsville said the upgrade to an employee-relations supervisor reflects increased demand for workplace investigations, promotional testing and other duties; he noted that an employee-relations specialist with law-enforcement background has helped reduce outsourcing costs for promotional testing and that adding a supervisor would provide needed capacity and allow the department to assist the fire department with promotional processes.
On staffing cadence, Townsville said the benefits-manager role is being placed on the FY28 horizon because the current benefits and risk staff have significant tenure and have committed to providing substantial notice if they retire. He described current succession planning as deliberate and said the timing allows the city to avoid hiring too early while ensuring replacement capacity when required.
Townsville and City Administrator Eric praised HR’s recent results: turnover decreased 30% from fiscal 2022 to fiscal 2024 while applicants per posted position increased 58% in the same period. The department also reported 90% employee participation in the Nectar recognition program, rollout of a harassment-training program with the city attorney, 3,000+ online training completions in Target Solutions (excluding police and fire), and scanning of over 50,000 pages of personnel files to create digital employee records.
Townsville said his FY26 personnel and operations asks total $206,009.58 and that the benefits-manager position is a later-year item. The committee asked for follow-up data on training hours and agreed the HR metrics (turnover and applicant rates) are useful performance indicators.
Ending: Townsville said HR will continue to present regular updates as compensation-plan revisions, training initiatives and succession planning proceed.
