By Yoav Gonen, September 6, 2022
The city Department of Health and Mental Hygiene had nearly 1,200 unfilled positions in June — making the agency on the pandemic’s frontline one of 46 in city government missing more than 10% of their budgeted employees, according to preliminary figures obtained by THE CITY.
The numbers reflect an ongoing challenge in hiring and retaining government workers, an issue that’s getting scrutiny at a hearing on Friday under City Councilmember Gale Brewer’s Oversight and Investigations Committee, which produced the preliminary numbers.
They show the citywide government jobs vacancy rate at 7.9% as of June. The agency with the most extreme shortfall was the Commission on Human Rights, which had 37 of its 136 budgeted positions unfilled — a rate of 27.2%.
Among larger agencies, vacancy rates were highest at the Department of Buildings, at 24.2% (489 vacancies), the Department of Health at 19.1% (1,189 vacancies) and the Department of Social Services at 17.3% (2,256 openings).
The numbers were slightly better at the city’s uniformed agencies.
The Department of Correction had a shortage of 862 workers in June, or 9.1%, although an extended trend of employees calling out sick has been compounding problems there.
And while the NYPD had a comparatively low vacancy rate of 2.9% in June, that equates to 1,448 unfilled positions, the preliminary numbers show.
“I don’t know where all these vacancies are, but I can tell you from personal experience, everything is slow in terms of getting sign-off,” said Brewer. “I’m just worried the expertise we’ve had over the years is going to disappear from the city.”
She pointed to the recent rehiring of former NYPD Chief and Office of Emergency Management Commissioner Joe Esposito — to run enforcement for the Department of Buildings — as an example of retention of municipal expertise.
