Restler introduces himself and asks about hard-to-recruit positions and salary review

Brilliant.

Thank you, Chair Aldeball.

This is my first time joining one of your hearings, and it's a pleasure.

One of my favorite new colleagues here in the Council, and you've been...

Just a tremendous asset and chair of this committee.

I feel like I go to you for questions and guidance on a range of issues, and it's been really helpful, and I really appreciate it.

So thank you for bringing your expertise to the council.

It's been a wonderful addition to the body.

Thank you, Deputy Commissioner Porter and team and DCAS.

I had a number of conversations with...

our amazing new DCAS commissioner at the beginning of her tenure, and she really emphasized that fixing the civil service process is at the top of her priority list.

And I really welcome that because we need that prioritization.

We need to do a better job of hiring in city government.

The timelines that it takes right now are simply unacceptable.

The first question I just wanted to lean in on is around the hard to recruit positions.

We have so many jobs in city government where we fail to fill them consistently over many years, but don't do very much about it.

I was recently reading a book that emphasized that when a transit authority

hired more engineers, it actually significantly reduced costs on their contracts that they were spending, and that we need to do a better job of building in-house capacity.

I know a long-time priority of DC37.

And so do more insourcing, not outsourcing.

And if we can fill those hard-to-recruit positions, it would make a huge difference.

And so I wanted to just ask kind of firstly, has there been a comprehensive review of increasing salaries for hard-to-recruit positions?

And even with an analysis of this,

savings that that could generate for the city of New York for why we should be increasing these specific positions.

I know this is part of an OLR challenge, but I know you're the ones who are really trying to solve it and they're trying to save us money.

So please help us solve it.

So what I can say is that there are many strategies and discussions that are underway to figure out how to modernize the civil service system and make things move faster, building in more transparency and, you know, so that we can better support

city agencies in general and the services that they provide.

As you mentioned, you know, DCAS, we, you know, we're not.

Involved in salary setting per se.

But we can definitely take the question back to, you know, answer if anything is going on.

But from a DCAS perspective...

Are you aware of OLR doing a comprehensive review of hard-to-recruit positions?

Not that I'm...

Privy to, but there are other things that, you know, other discussions that are underway to figure out, you know, how to modernize the system.