Salinas HR presents AB 2561 vacancy report as council presses for hiring fixes

Salinas human resources staff presented the city’s first annual AB 2561 vacancy hearing on May 27, outlining 2024 hiring, vacancy and retention data and describing steps the city is taking to speed recruitments and retain staff.

Human Resources Manager Patricia Peñaloza told the council AB 2561 requires public agencies to track vacancies and present them annually before adoption of the final budget. Peñaloza said the report covered vacancies, recruitment activity and separations for the calendar year Jan. 1–Dec. 31, 2024, and that the city recorded 144 vacancies filled in 2024 and 124 new vacancies created during the year. She said the city’s authorized full‑time workforce stood at about 650 positions, including over‑hires and frozen positions; at year start there were 99 remaining open vacancies and at year end 88.

Why the process can take months

Peñaloza described the multi‑step hiring pipeline — job description revisions and meet‑and‑confer where required, advertising, application screening (no AI used), written or performance exams when needed, panel oral interviews, eligibility lists, departmental interviews, conditional offers and then preplacement checks such as backgrounds, fingerprints and TB tests — and said the city measures average days to fill for classifications. For some management classifications in the AMPS unit she said average days to fill reached 91.3 days and that promotional recruitments and continuous eligible lists are used for hard‑to‑fill roles such as police service technicians and engineers.

Which units are hardest to fill

HR identified three bargaining units at or above a 20% vacancy rate in 2024: Association of Management Personnel (AMPS), department directors (including assistant city manager and assistant police chief vacancies) and Police Managers Association (PMA, sergeant/commander ranks). Peñaloza said several AMPS positions — senior civil engineer, associate planner, plan check engineer, superintendent of maintenance services and technical services manager — were vacant at year‑end or earlier in 2024.

Incentives, remote work and outreach

HR confirmed targeted recruitment and retention incentives the council previously authorized — for example, police lateral incentives — and said police recruit incentives were used up and lateral incentives had helped hire several laterals with others in backgrounds. Peñaloza said the city is reviewing remote/hybrid opportunities and possible salary adjustments and hiring incentives for hard‑to‑fill roles and plans to expand outreach (job fairs, branding, LinkedIn and professional advertising) and onboarding supports (life‑scan processing in HR and extended office hours).

Council questions and staff clarifications

Council members emphasized public safety staffing and training investments. Peñaloza and Sylvia Enriquez, HR manager, said as of the report roughly 15% of the current workforce is eligible for retirement, and 38% were hired in the last five years. On police staffing the chief and HR said the authorized sworn count is 161 but frozen positions and current vacancies mean fewer sworn personnel are in service; staff said there were about 11 recruits in the academy and roughly 8–10 current officer vacancies at the time of the report. On incentives, Peñaloza said the city has been successful with the police recruit and lateral incentives but that broader citywide hiring incentives are being explored.

What the report recommends

HR told council it will present AB 2561 data annually and recommended continued collaboration with department managers and bargaining units to shorten timelines and address pay and job‑design obstacles. Staff proposed continuing targeted incentives for critical roles, expanding employer branding and interview workshops for city staff, and conducting classification work where gaps persist.

Bottom line

Salinas human resources framed the hiring delays as the result of lengthy, multi‑step public‑sector processes and an increasingly competitive labor market for specialized roles. Council members asked for more detail on incentives, outreach and targeted strategies to reduce time‑to‑fill for critical public‑safety and engineering classifications. Staff endorsed returning with additional proposals — including possible general hiring incentives and classification adjustments — as part of the next budget cycle.