- Lansing has over 120 city job vacancies, and some residents I talked to says it's causing a strain on local services.
- The city's HR Director cites recessions, retirements, and challenges in finding qualified candidates.
- Watch the video above to see an in-depth look at the issue, and how the city is addressing it.
For your convenience, the skimmable summary above is generated with the assistance of AI and fact checked by our team prior to publication. Read the full story as originally reported below.
Neighbor Loretta Stanaway has her opinions about the 125 current open positions in the city of Lansing.
“Too excessive,” she said.
Excessive to the point where Stanaway said she missing out on city services.
“I really believe that this budget coming up should be fixed to focus on the citizens and how we could provide better stronger, services moving forward in the future,” said Councilman Ryan Kost.
Kost has been vocal about his opinions on the number of vacancies for a while now. He thinks some of the positions have been open far too long. Like Electrical Technician job that has been open since 2006.
“Which is when I graduated from high school,” Kost said. “If you put that into perspective, thats insane.
After hearing concerns about the vacancies, it was time for us to take a trip to the HR Department.
“These are hard to fill positions and its challenging right now to find people with those qualifications in this climate,” said Lansing’s HR Director Elizabeth O’Leary
O’Leary said there’s a lot of factors that tie into why these positions aren’t filled.
There's been some recessions where we have had freezes and we have our work force retirement, where people retire in 25 years and those people are coming up on retirement and we have to fill those positions,” O’Leary said.
O'Leary said she believes her department has made progress over the last year with getting positions filled, but we asked her why there are only 16 jobs posted online, when there are 125 open positions.
That number changes every day,” she said. “What you don't see on the background is there are 40 other positions being worked on right now.”
