TRURO — The lack of a full-time human resources coordinator continues to affect the town’s ability to fill essential staff positions, officials have said in the wake of recent reports about long delays in basic services like approval of permits for condo conversions. The new position was approved at town meeting on May 5, but a budget override to pay for it was defeated by 32 votes at a town election in June.
Now town officials are looking for other ways to fund the job. “We need to find a way to fund it internally versus asking for additional taxpayer dollars,” Town Manager Darrin Tangeman told the Independent. “This is our number one priority in the coming year.”
Tangeman said that he, Assistant Town Manager Kelly Clark, Finance Director Alex Lessin, and their staff will analyze the budget in the months ahead to identify possible cuts.
Lessin emphasized that looking at previous years’ line-item surpluses isn’t necessarily reliable because “conditions change every year.”
The HR coordinator position comes with salary and benefits of about $113,000 per year, plus a 2.5-percent annual cost-of-living adjustment. Officials expect to put it on the town meeting warrant in the spring, but this time it would be funded in the operating budget, not by a Proposition 2½ override.
In the absence of a coordinator, key HR tasks continue to be divided up among Tangeman, Clark, Lessin’s department, and marketing coordinator Katie Riconda, who handles promoting job opportunities on the town’s website, on social media, and in a monthly newsletter.
“It’s a group effort,” said Riconda, who was hired last November.
“It’s a huge challenge now to find a way to accommodate the work with the existing number of employees,” select board chair Susan Areson told the Independent.
A Failed Effort
The select board’s proposed hiring of an HR coordinator got strong support at the May town meeting. John Dundas, then the clerk of the board, spoke about how staffing challenges are linked to the lack of affordable housing in Truro and said that this made human resources work more time-consuming.
Kristen Reed, then the chair of the select board, referred to the strain on Clark, who had taken on most of the HR tasks along with her regular responsibilities. “She works through the weekend, she works through her lunch, she works through soccer games,” said Reed.
“It is not just something somebody can do when they’re not busy with something else,” said housing authority chair Kevin Grunwald.
Voter Michael Forgione expressed shock that the town did not have an HR coordinator, though he was concerned about the cost. He asked if outsourcing had been considered.
Reed responded that outsourcing had been discussed at budget task force and select board meetings, but the staff preferred that it be an in-house position.
Dept. of Public Works Director Jarrod Cabral agreed. “The hiring, termination, and retirement process needs to be uniform for everyone,” he said. “You want consistency with your personnel. You want consistency with HR who is going to help manage your personnel.”
The budget override for the job passed at town meeting but was defeated at a special town election, with 256 opposed and 224 in favor.
A Tipping Point
Truro currently lists eight full-time vacancies in six town departments. This is on par with other Outer Cape towns — Provincetown has six full-time openings, Wellfleet has seven, and Eastham has nine, according to their job portals.
Each of the other Outer Cape towns has a full-time HR coordinator to oversee recruiting and hiring. In fact, Truro is one of few towns on Cape Cod that does not have an employee or department dedicated to those efforts.
This has led to prolonged vacancies — such as the joint office assistant for the health, conservation, and building depts., which has gone unfilled for seven months. As the Independent has reported, that vacancy has slowed year-round condominium conversion approval and increased the workload on Health and Conservation Agent Emily Beebe.
Tangeman said there had been an attempt to hire someone for the job over the summer, but the chosen applicant declined the town’s offer, and the entire process had to be restarted. He said new applications have since been received and interviews will begin soon.
In the past, HR duties were handled by an administrative assistant to the assistant town manager. But that job shifted to “planning assistant,” with tasks related to accounting and licensing, and the HR work fell back on Clark. These changes are outlined in a five-page position justification form that Clark submitted to the budget task force last year and later provided to the Independent.
“I can only do so much, and there’s a lot of things I’m not able to do,” said Clark. “It’s frustrating because our employees deserve better, our potential employees deserve better, and our community deserves better.”
HR work includes compliance with labor laws and the town’s personnel bylaw, collective bargaining with six unions, workers’ compensation, criminal record review, personnel record maintenance, and other confidentiality-driven tasks.
Finance Director Lessin said that the town faces increasing regulatory complexity in employment law, with at least 14 laws to comply with. “There’s far more reporting and compliance requirements than there were even a few years ago,” he said.
Tangeman and Clark said that, without an HR coordinator, these responsibilities fall primarily on Clark, with help from the town’s administrative team and department heads.
“This creates a decentralized approach to human resources, which is not ideal because there are so many intricacies and legal implications,” said Clark.
In the position justification form, Clark suggested the salary range for a coordinator should be $60,706 to $79,207 and emphasized that recruitment challenges had made the job more difficult. She wrote that the increased workload from pandemic recovery, the select board’s goals, and town projects that had been years in development had made it harder to manage HR effectively.
“In the last 18 months,” Clark wrote, “these demands have reached a tipping point where critical human resource tasks are being deprioritized, best practices are not able to be followed, and work is being completed in a reactionary mode rather than efficiently and deliberately.”
“I know I could be doing a better job if I had the capacity, but I don’t have the capacity,” Clark told town meeting on May 5.
Tangeman said he and his staff will present recommendations on the HR situation to the select board and budget task force during the town’s upcoming warrant development and budget planning process.
