Think fast: How many garbage truck drivers work for the City of Cleveland? During budget season, that’s more than trivia.
And this year, a change in the way Mayor Justin Bibb’s budget displays staffing figures has aroused some indignation on City Council.
Older city budgets listed the number of budgeted jobs (99 waste collection drivers in 2022), the number on staff at the end of the prior year (73 drivers in 2021) and the pay range (about $23 an hour in 2022).
That level of detail was repeated, division after division, in long lists of staffing numbers throughout the budget book.
Busting the ‘ghost vacancies’
The 2024 budget is different. Gone are the laundry lists of jobs and pay scales. Instead, the budget tallies the city head count on a series of color-coded organizational charts. But it doesn’t say specifically how many positions are vacant for each classification.
This year, each division has a number of generic vacancies that it can deploy as it needs. The change will help city officials be more flexible in making hiring decisions, Finance Director Ahmed Abonamah has argued.
Maybe the Division of Waste Collection and Disposal needs more garbage truck drivers. Or maybe it needs more attendants at the waste transfer station. It can fill its 19 full-time vacancies in 2024 as it sees fit.
Plus, there’s money for more than 100 other uncommitted positions in a “vacancy pool” that any department could apply to use. Abonamah pitched the pool as a hiring incentive for department heads. Fill the vacancies you have, and you can pull more jobs from the pool.
Both council and the administration say they want to bring new employees on faster.
“A lot of vacancies are just sitting there,” Abonamah told council last week.
Bibb, speaking about police jobs, referred to such long-empty positions as “ghost vacancies.”
Council’s Mike Polensek gets out the magnifying glass
But council doesn’t like losing the granular detail on staffing and pay. The change, they say, complicates their job of watchdogging the administration.
All week, Ward 8 Council Member Michael Polensek has wagged a magnifying glass to make his point. He has even invoked a city charter provision saying that council can demand “any other information” from the finance director during the budget process.
“Now you can’t figure out heads from tails here,” Polensek said during this week’s hearings. “Sometimes I think, somehow, they don’t want us to figure out here who’s working where and what they’re making. And it’s so frustrating that I got to use a magnifying glass on the org chart.”
Council members may prefer poring over head counts with jewelers’ loupes, but they typically don’t tinker much with the staffing numbers. This year, though, Ward 10’s Anthony Hairston lobbied to add 20 building inspector jobs.
By the way, according to this year’s budget org charts, 64 garbage truck drivers worked for the city at the end of 2023. They now can make between $23.04 and $30.45 an hour, thanks to Cleveland’s latest contract with Teamsters Local 507.
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