Medford’s Retention Problem
I took a tally recently of Medford City Hall’s turnover of senior staff in the last five or six years. My imperfect accounting is that Medford’s gone through one Director of Human Resources, two Economic Development Directors, one Chief of Staff, one Finance Director, at least three deputy Finance Directors, two Fire Chiefs, two Veteran Services Directors, three City Solicitors, three Building Commissioners, three Elections Managers, one Prevention and Outreach Manager, and one Commissioner of the Department of Public Works. Some turnover is natural, and people retire, but as I work my way through my third budget season on Council I’ve started to notice a pattern. City Council recently discussed a paper to raise the salaries of the Veteran Services Director, the Elections Manager, and the Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and the only disagreement the Council had was that the Elections Manager should have an even higher salary — a marked departure from similar conversations the City Council was having five years ago. The release of the election results were bungled in 2023, which encourage a candidate to demand a recount, costing the City tens of thousands of dollars. We can’t afford to keep cycling through Elections Managers.
Last month, when the Recreation Director presented his budget, I asked about a line item for a $27500 part-time office manager. It came up during a meeting last year, with the Director noting that he and his staff were so busy answering phone calls that they didn’t have enough time to do more programming. He said that they had trouble hiring and retaining one ($27,500 is really low even for a half-time job, after all). A similar issue came up in a discussion with the Finance Director, who had had three Assistant Finance Directors in four years. The last two had gone to work with jobs in the state government due to higher salaries and the ability to work hybrid (Medford doesn’t allow remote workers).
Why aren’t they paid more? The biggest factor is that Medford doesn’t have too much money. Under Proposition 2.5, the only way to increase our budget is to either have an override (if we hadn’t suceeded in our first override campaign in 2024, our budget problems would be far, far worse) or have new development. Cambridge has a billion dollar budget today because they started building up Kendall Square decades ago. We only rezoned Medford Square two weeks ago, a project over 20 years in the making, bucking an historic anti-development streak that still impacts the city’s pocketbook. New growth from that will take time. The next place we’re rezoning is Boston Ave, before continuing with the rezoning process in other areas of the city after the summer.
Even with the lack of money overall, the city has a few positions that it underbudgets, leading to frequent turnover and chronically unfilled roles. We need a study of which positions we can’t consistently fill, then cut a few (at least for a few years) and add the salaries to others so that we might be able to fill some of them. I don’t really see the point of having roles on the books that we know we can’t fill. We’d probably save more money in the long run by having a long-term Assistant Finance Director paid $110,000 a year than three short-term Assistant Finance Directors paid $80,000 a year.
Outside of budgets, a change to the City’s employee policies can really help with keeping them around. Allowing hybrid work would definitely help with retention, as would allowing new employees more than two weeks of vacation annually in their first five years on the job.
