The Daily Agenda: Pima County makes headway in hiring

The county had a ton of vacant positions ... Some departments still have empty desks ... South Tucson leaders buy motels.

Like the rest of the workforce, Pima County has seen its employment rate fluctuate in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, with around 1,300 jobs going undone.

We’re talking about unfilled jobs in law enforcement, public and behavioral health, education oversight, transportation and more.

As vacancy rates peaked, the county decided to review its compensation, classifications, benefits and more to see if it could do better when it comes to competitively recruiting and retaining staff across all departments.

In July, the county gave raises to nearly every employee, but it didn’t stop there. The county has also expanded its benefit packages, enacted flexible work schedules and increased and improved options for paid leave.

It seems as if the strategies are making a difference, with the vacancy rate decreasing nearly 5 percentage points over the past year, down to 12.7% in July, according to a memo by Pima County Administrator Jan Lesher. Though while the overall trendline is going in the right direction, some departments are still facing hiring challenges and have triple-digit vacancies or close.

The top three departments with the most vacancies are the sheriff, county attorney’s office and health department, although the open positions have a vastly different impact on overall staffing.

• In the health department, the 122 unfilled positions equate to a vacancy rate of 26%, with 467 total positions available. The open jobs include both permanent and grant-funded positions, said spokeswoman Cass Greer.

• The county attorney office’s 89 open positions represent a vacancy rate of 22% in a department that pre-pandemic had as many as 400 employees.

• But the sheriff’s department’s 104 available jobs only amount to a 7% vacancy rate in a department that has 1,496 total positions.

Despite the smaller percentage, Sheriff Chris Nanos has been vocal in recent months about the impact of what he calls an understaffed department, with deaths in the jail occurring on what seems to be a regular basis.

But money isn’t always the problem, as Pima County Supervisor Steve Christy noted during a discussion Tuesday about whether the county should even accept a pair of grants that would fund several positions in the county attorney’s office.

“If we don’t have the people to fill the positions now, how are we going to have the people to fill them once we accept the grant money?” Christy asked.

The answer was unclear, but a vote still ensued, with Supervisor Sharon Bronson offering what many might consider to be universal advice.

“Never turn down money,” she said, before the county voted unanimously to accept the grants.

The discussion isn’t over. Christy wants Pima County Attorney Laura Conover “provide some direction” as to how she plans to address the vacancies in her office.

But part of the problem is the county isn’t even funding some of those positions. Conover told us that 37 of the 89 positions have not been funded by the county, which account for about 10% of the office’s overall staff.

Of the 52 remaining open positions, nine are in some phase of the hiring process, leaving 43 funded positions vacant.

The open jobs in the county attorney’s office are located mainly in the criminal and victim services divisions and are mostly non-attorney staff positions, Conover told us. These include redactors who review body camera and other video footage that’s often traumatic. Conover said the position has a high turnover rate, adding that it’s very taxing work at very low-pay.

“They’re sitting in a dark room redacting video all day, and when people realize they could make more money at In-N-Out Burger listening to really great music and making people happy with burgers and fries … that happens a lot,” Conover said.

Victim services has its own set of challenges in hiring, one being that Pima County’s victim advocates are some of the only ones in the state who handle crisis calls after regular hours.

There’s also the issue of low starting pay for prosecutors, which makes hiring and retaining skilled workers difficult. The county attorney’s office starting annual salary for attorneys is around $70,000, but higher pay is easy to find without having to go far, Conover said.

“The City (office) across the street is now (starting attorneys) at $78,000,” she said. “And they like to say the truth, which is come (try) misdemeanors instead of felonies and work from 9-5 with very little stress and make more money.”

This leaves the Pima County Attorney’s Office as one of the lowest paid — if not the lowest paid — prosecuting agency in the state, Conover said, despite her securing agency-wide salary increases in October 2021 for the first time in nearly 25 years.

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Conover said she believes the county is making progress and that the classification and compensation project is a step in the right direction. But there’s still work to be done. The Pinal County Attorney’s Office is offering lawyers $30,000 more and a shuttle service, she noted.

Melting Pot U: The University of Arizona’s incoming class is more diverse than any in the school’s history, El Inde’s¹ Brianna McCord reports. Just shy of half the class identifies as non-white.

“It wasn’t terrible, but it’s nice to see different people,” Gagana Ameneni, a 17-year-old Asian-Indian who attended a mostly-white high school in Mesa, said. “Hopefully, it will just get better overall, learn about more people and just be more inclusive and realize there’s a world out there.”

Better than a hedge fund: Wick Communications is buying the Arizona Daily Sun newspaper in Flagstaff. Wick is based in Sierra Vista and owns the Sierra Vista Herald, along with six other newspapers in Arizona and more than a dozen more in other states. The Daily Sun was owned by Iowa-based Lee Enterprises, which co-owns the Arizona Daily Star along with Gannett. All Sun employees have been offered employment at Wick, the company said in a news release. 

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No rules for new tools: UA students are coming back to campus with AI tools readily available, but university administrators haven't created a policy for how students can use those tools, the Daily Wildcat's Bailey Ekstrom reports. For now, students are left wondering whether they can use AI to help them write papers after they do research or how they should handle bias embedded within AI tools.

“We are not equipped because we’re not having the conversation,” Arthur ‘Barney’ Maccabe, the executive director of the Institute for the Future of Data and Computing at the UA, said.

Nicely done: Community leaders and workers at the Casa Maria Soup Kitchen bought the Arizona Motel, KGUN's Reyna Preciado reports. They plan to use it for affordable housing, along with the El Camino Motel they bought earlier this year. They're planning to buy two other motels as soon as they raise the money.

“The Arizona Motel has been serving South Tucson since 1930, and we’re hoping to keep it in the community and off the speculative market to continue serving those who need it the most, the most vulnerable communities,” said Roxanna Valenzuela, a South Tucson city councilmember who also works for Casa Maria.

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1. El Inde publishes reporting by UA journalism students. We’re love highlighting the great work being done by the next generation of reporters.