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Committee reviews hiring bottlenecks for police, fire, EMS and nurses; DHR, departments outline reforms
Summary
DHR, Fire, Police and DPH briefed supervisors on recruitment and retention challenges: DHR described continuous testing and parallelized hiring steps, fire and police cited recruitment competition and EMS shortages, and DPH reported hundreds of nursing/clinician vacancies; committee continued the hearing for further reporting.
The committee convened a cross‑departmental briefing on Jan. 21 into why critical public‑safety and public‑health positions remain unfilled and what the city can do to shorten hiring timelines.
Kate Howard of the Department of Human Resources outlined reforms intended to shorten time‑to‑hire, including continuous testing via the National Testing Network, parallelizing physical and oral exams for police candidates, fee waivers for applicants, and creation of a civilian background investigator classification to free sworn officers for other duties. She said those process changes have cut parts of DHR’s screening time and allow more frequent candidate intake.
Fire Chief Janine Nicholson described a 14% increase in call volume since 2015 and an ongoing shortage of EMS personnel; the department reported being unable to staff an average of five ambulances per day and relying on overtime and per‑diem staff. Nicholson recommended expanding community paramedicine programs and noted challenges recruiting specialized prevention engineers and IT staff.
Deputy Chief Greg Gee of the Police Department described recruitment innovations—boot camps, outreach to nontraditional candidate pools (Peace Corps, university athletes, social‑science majors), cadet programs and retention efforts—but cited background investigations as the largest time block (three to nine months) and noted the department’s lengthy academy and field‑training timeline. He emphasized wellness and retention strategies to keep new officers in the city.
Michael Brown, DPH human resources director, said DPH has identified roughly 75 RN vacancies at Zuckerberg and about 52 behavioral‑health clinician positions as priorities; he noted backlogs in hiring processes and the need for dedicated recruiters. Supervisors asked departments to provide disaggregated vacancy counts, the proportion of in‑city employees, and follow‑up data; the chair continued the matter to the call of the chair for additional reporting.
