Towns and Cities Across Massachusetts are Fighting a Staffing Crisis

With employees leaving at unprecedented rates and difficulties hiring, towns and cities of all sizes are reeling

Jay Greenwald

This week in towns across Massachusetts, garbage will get picked up, 9-1-1 operators will answer calls, and plows stand ready for winter snow. But what about next week? Residents rely on towns and cities to consistently provide these services and more, but without serious change, services may grind to a halt. Facing a high rate of retirement and a competitive labor market, local governments throughout Massachusetts are struggling to provide the services their residents expect.

Retirement Crisis

Leading up to the pandemic, America’s municipal workers tended to be older, which made them more likely to retire when offices shut down when covid-19 hit.  According to a report by Mission Square Research Institute (MSRI), the median age of public workers is 3 to 5 years older than that of private sector workers. 

Michael Herbert, the Town Manager of Ashland, Massachusetts, says that a critical number of the 150 municipal workers in his town retired during the pandemic and he predicts that Ashland will “will not be able to attract the caliber of people that can provide the services that residents want … and residents will feel frustrated with that.”

When town governments returned to in-person work, more departures followed. Kathy Davies-O’Leary, the head of Human resources for Framingham, says the lack of work flexibility created staffing problems as many employees preferred to retire or move to the private sector rather than work in-person five days a week. She points out that when the new mayor, Charlie Sisitsky, implemented a mandatory return to in-person work schedule, many workers who had stayed on through the pandemic quit. 

Simultaneously, towns and cities are finding it more difficult to hire new workers, due to the low salaries they offer. In Worcester, the median salary for city workers is only $64K, which ends up around  $31 an hour for a 40-hour work week. The living wage, however, is $38 an hour for an adult and one child, according to Living Wage Calculator . Based on these numbers, an employee earning the median municipal salary in Worcester cannot meet the basic needs of a small family in the city that they serve. Overall, just 31% of public government employees report that they are satisfied with their pay, according to MSRI. During the pandemic, 23% of public workers in the nation took on debt, 21% dipped into emergency funds or savings, and 12% borrowed money from friends or family.

Framingham is facing similar hiring issues. With around 70,000 residents and 650 municipal employees, Framingham’s job website is currently flush with open positions. These opportunities range from part time crossing guards with a salary of around $5,600 to billing coordinators with at least 3 years of experience, positions paying between $55K to $60K per year. 

Towns have the most trouble hiring for positions requiring advanced education and degrees, like accountants and financial managers. Even before the pandemic, Herbert says, Ashland couldn’t compete with the private sector for talent to oversee Ashland’s budget of around $75 million, which demands management by high quality financial experts, people who could easily get a job at a large financial institution like Bain Capital.

Public sector jobs have also lost their luster as interest in pensions and exceptional retirement benefits has declined among young job candidates. Young people coming out of university may be unwilling to commit to a smaller salary in order to take advantage of a pension plan that requires them to stay in a single job for decades. Davies-O’Leary says, “If you are going to be here 20 years, a pension is a really good thing, but if you are going to be hopping around your pension will be small.” Herbert noted that pension plans aren’t free–employees are paying into their plans at 9-11% – meaning that employees see their salaries shrink as they try to take full advantage of their benefits.  Retirement benefits that further degrade a low salary may be unattractive to young people who have high rental expenses or expensive student loans.

Work-life balance is another key reason municipalities can’t retain staff. In Ashland, the town’s system requires employees to attend frequent, long, nighttime community meetings that eat into what is traditionally family/personal time. Herbert says that he personally attends two or more meetings a week that usually go on for hours. These consistent opportunities for community engagement are vital for a municipality, and it is important they be held outside of typical working hours to allow working residents to attend. However, he says, many of his staff have left their jobs in favor of those that fit more standard hours and are more conducive to raising a family. 

While towns deal with a contracting workforce and struggle to pay employees adequately, the general decline in civic pride in the US makes recruiting that much more difficult. There was a time when civic-minded people were drawn to jobs in municipal government because they enjoyed connecting with their community, but Herbert and Davies-O’Leary both feel that the tenor of community engagement has worsened significantly in recent years. 

It’s also getting tougher to be a public-facing government employee. Herbert noted that earlier in his career, constituents often disagreed with decisions he made or policies he implemented, but generally people recognized that he and the town government were doing the best they could. Recently, he says, his job has become more adversarial and politicized. He notes that even when criticism is warranted, it is now being delivered in such a negative tone that it hurts the morale of his employees.

Davies-O’Leary agrees that it’s become more difficult to avoid the scathing criticism, especially now that social media is an easy platform for comments. Framingham has very active groups on Facebook; town employees who live in Framingham have access to these groups where high levels of criticism are a constant feature of the job. She says that, as the HR manager, she worries about her employees’ morale when seeing remarks online about the quality of government work.

Solutions

What can be done to solve this looming collapse? Solutions to the staffing crisis in local government mostly center on providing higher salaries so that towns and cities can compete with the private sector, and that comes down to raising local taxes. In other words, if local governments are going to continue to provide the services the community relies on, funding is key. 

Raising salaries for municipal employees is especially difficult because when towns suggest raising taxes, they often face taxpayer accusations of mismanagement and waste, a politically charged refrain. But in communities, there is a direct line from tax dollars to services. When a town or city runs on a skeleton crew, services like library access and senior center outreach are immediately impacted. Herbert pointed to Ashland’s senior center which has been without an outreach coordinator for years after pandemic retirements forced him to promote from within without adequate replacements.

Towns and cities also lack a strong career pipeline,  Davies-O’Leary notes “Nobody grows up wanting to be an assessor.” Creating pathways to these jobs will require long term investment in educational opportunities, which are expensive and won’t pay off for years to come. Given the struggles towns and cities are facing to fund their current staff, it seems unlikely taxpayers will have any appetite for funding job creation programs that may not help their governments for a decade, unless they understand the stakes if they don’t. 

Davies-O’leary also suggested that municipalities should offer their employees maximum flexibility to retain the younger employees. She opined that her city’s government had bowed to political pressure and brought the staff back in person without listening to the employees, which has hampered her ability to hire and retain staff. 

Some local governments are getting creative. Springfield, the third largest city in Massachusetts, held “Walk-in Wednesdays,” in October; residents were invited to come to City Hall and apply for open jobs on the spot. Springfield’s website proudly announced that 80 applicants showed up on the first day. 

While open enrollments and civic promotions may provide stop gap measures for some types of work, it is unlikely that Springfield will fill all of its open seats. According to Springfield’s jobs website, there are still dozens of job openings, including for roles such as dentist and physician. Jobs requiring years of schooling and active certifications prove difficult to fill even for a large city like Springfield.