Syracuse City HR seeks more staff, highlights safety training and roughly $1.2M in workers’ comp savings

At a Syracuse City Council budget hearing, the Department of Personnel and Labor Relations presented staffing gaps, safety initiatives and a requested administrative hire while reporting a drop in lost work days and an estimated $1.2 million in workers’ compensation savings from recent risk-management efforts.

The department’s presenter, identified in the hearing as a staff member from the Department of Personnel and Labor Relations, told council members that lost work days have fallen from “over 2,500 lost days at work down to about 800,” and directly attributed an estimated savings of “about $1,200,000 in savings by actually managing our workers' comp.” The presenter also said recordable injuries fell about 29% from 62 in 2023 to 44 in 2024.

Those figures were presented alongside details of ongoing safety and training work. Lisa Schmidt, the department’s risk and safety manager, has led a suite of trainings including monthly CPR/AED and defensive-driving sessions, a monthly “stop the bleed” training, and a train-the-trainer approach that sends staff to state training opportunities (for HAZWOPER, silica, traffic control and confined-spaces training) and brings that instruction back to city worksites. The department also launched a safety handbook and is developing emergency action plans and a system of fire wardens for city facilities.

Why it matters: the department said slips, trips and falls are the current top driver of claims—about 23% of claims and roughly $1.4 million a year—so the training and audits are intended to reduce both frequency and severity of injuries. The presenter framed the recent rise in filed claims as partly the result of a better safety culture: “the increase in frequency is good. That means they're letting us know when things are going wrong,” and the department has seen severity decline as a result of education and prevention measures.

Staffing and workload: the presenter described active recruiting and several vacancies. The assistant director post has been vacant since April 10 and interviews for that position began the day of the hearing. A new HR leadership hire named Ben is scheduled to start May 28 and will handle employee and labor relations; a new safety-training staffer, Matt Tripp, was reported to start the Wednesday after the hearing. The HR specialist vacancy has been open about four months; a long-running HR generalist position (formerly called a professional development coordinator) has been vacant or unfilled in its current form for about three years and has been reclassified to better support labor relations.

The department described a heavy grievance workload: “We've had 20 [grievances] since the beginning of the year and we've got about 7 going to arbitration right now,” the presenter said. To help manage recurring workload and large billing volumes, the department requested one administrative assistant to handle the medical/dental/vision and retiree billing associated with an $80,000,000 medical program.

Contracts and outside vendors: the presenter said five collective bargaining agreements are up for negotiation this year, naming CSEA and units labeled “417 73, middle managers and trades.” The department uses BPAS for benefits administration at no cost to the city, and contracts HR Works to manage Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) administration; the professional services line for that work was cited in the presentation as $541,500 (budget reference: page 89). The city’s workers' compensation investigations are handled through the workers’ comp vendor; employee investigations have used outside counsel billed through the law department.

HR modernization and payroll: REA Teitelbaum, the HRIS manager, was described as leading timekeeping implementation and serving as the implementer if and when the city adopts a modern payroll/timekeeping system. The presenter said Syracuse Police Department (SPD) currently maintains separate HR arrangements and there is no immediate plan to bring SPD HR into the department’s structure when modernization occurs; the department indicated a preference to “get it up and running for the folks that we oversee and then we'd like to bring SPD as much into the fold as is feasible.”

Data and process limits: the department said its legacy system (AS/400) does not readily produce attrition metrics and that exit interviews are offered on request rather than systematically captured. The presenter said the department is understaffed relative to common HR benchmarks: “HR alone should be bare minimum is about 1 person per hundred,” and the department currently measures about 0.59 per 100 employees (or 0.77 per 100 if safety staff are counted).

Council members asked follow-up questions about unannounced field safety audits by the safety team, training for DPW and seasonal parks staff, and whether SPD and fire would join a future centralized HR/timekeeping system. The presenter answered that the safety officers perform audits in varied shifts (including early-morning observations) and that safety training covers administrative spaces up to heavy-equipment operators.

The hearing closed with the department emphasizing that additional staffing would increase capacity and timeliness of HR services and support continued savings and safety gains.

Ending: the department said interviews for several vacancies would start the following week or that same afternoon, that Ben would begin on May 28, and that Matt Tripp would join the safety team the Wednesday after the hearing.