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Finance Cabinet outlines staffing push to speed Kentucky state parks projects
Summary
Finance Cabinet officials told a legislative subcommittee they shifted experienced staff and hired new project-management assistants to accelerate 46 state parks projects, but said project-manager capacity remains strained amid roughly 1,149 active projects across the Commonwealth.
Chair Thomas convened the Budget Review Subcommittee on Personnel, Public Retirement, and Finance and Administrative Cabinet and heard an update from Scott Baker, executive director at the Office of Facility Development and Efficiency in the Finance Cabinet, on efforts to accelerate state parks projects.
Scott Baker said the Finance Cabinet shifted experienced staff onto parks work and has started training new hires to fill backfilled roles. "What we did initially is we took some of our key veteran staff, and we moved them to focus on parks projects first," Baker said, adding that one veteran lead had previously spent about five years working with parks.
The update said there are 46 parks projects currently active with the Department of Parks and that the Finance Cabinet moved from weekly to biweekly progress meetings as field work increased. Baker said the agency is relying on a mix of internal promotions and new hires to handle the workload and to ensure staff understand both construction project management and "statutory procurement laws," which he described as part of the Commonwealth's project-management requirements.
Baker told the subcommittee the office has roughly 15 project managers, plus additional assistant roles being filled, and that a new assistant-level hire was expected to start "coming on the 20 fourth," according to his remarks. "We have way more projects than we really have project managers," Baker said. He gave a figure of 1,149 active projects across the office. Baker also said some individual project managers carry heavy loads—he cited an architect in Paducah assigned to 27 projects—and that the office aims for an optimal caseload of about 30 projects per manager.
Committee members pressed for staffing totals and capacity. A member asked whether the office is "at full capacity," and Baker responded with the project-manager and active-project counts above. Baker and the committee discussed specific park maintenance needs such as updates to campgrounds and particular issues at Lake Barclay including sewer, water and roof work that the Finance Cabinet is addressing.
Baker framed the staffing challenges as partly tied to a busy private construction market that competes for experienced project managers. He also noted that recent legislative budgets have been unusually large for these types of capital investments, which has increased the load on the office as it deploys funds and oversees projects.
No formal actions or votes were taken at the meeting. The subcommittee did not reach quorum at the time of roll call and planned to reconvene or adopt minutes at a later time; the chair said staff would follow up with participants about future meetings.
The meeting record shows this was an informational update; no directive or formal adoption of policy or new positions was recorded during the session.
