Let me share with some thought that I am having about related to town personnel and the challenges ahead. I don’t have the final answers, the new board that will be installed in December will have to tackle these issues.
Like almost all businesses now, the Town of Highlands faces a potential worker shortage in the coming months and may be years. This past year we have had a number of a veteran, highly experienced workers retire. And, they are not taking early retirement, for the most part they put in about 30 or more years of service to the town.
The town has to compete in the market place for skilled workers. For instance, a worker who has a CDL drivers license is now in very high demand. Local contractors and construction companies are willing to pay a high hourly rate for CDL drivers and heavy equipment operators. The town to has this demand too in that in all public works areas we need personnel who hold at least the CDL-B license. For instance, we need all personnel on our sanitation crews to have a CDL to drive our trucks.
Related to this potential worker shortage is how to compete to recruit and retain qualified and experienced workers. Early in the year the town simply had to increase police salaries across the board because we were losing the retention battle to other municipalities. Our police chief has been working hard to address the problem by her and other officers putting in overtime patrol duty hours while at the same time she has been actively recruiting new officers. The problem is that potential new officers have to undergo basic law enforcement training before hitting the road. If all goes as planned we will be back to full staff by the first of the new year.
Getting back to sanitation, we are in a similar shortage of personnel situation. How do we solve this recurring problem in sanitation? Folks constantly tell me everything would be solved if we went to one day a week residential pick up. I fail to see how that is a solution. Does that translate to cutting the hours of our seven person sanitation department to 32 hours a week? It’s hard enough to recruit sanitation workers for a 40 hour week, much less reducing their time to almost a part time status. Cutting the number of workers would be perilous also, in that sanitation workers across the nation have a very high workers compensation claims and are frequently sidelined due to on the job injuries.
Others have suggested privatizing the sanitation department. That too could be problematic in that Highlands is a very small, isolated market. A company could operate here for a few years and decided to leave. The might not be any replacement providers. Would be then get back into the sanitation market? It would be tremendously expensive if even possible. The long term solution is to increase worker compensation which could mean rate increases. Currently, residential service is $20 a month for 8 pickups. Honestly, we spend a whole lot more money on other services and conveniences here on the plateau and think nothing about it. Garbage removal and transporting it to a distance land fill over the mountains is an expensive proposition.
The new town board will be presented the results of a salary study that an outside agency has been conducting for the town this fall. Those results will help inform the board how and where to address the problem areas that I have described. The study might reveal other areas to address.