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EN HILLS MEMORANDUM DATE: August 26, 2013 TO: Patrick Klaers, City Administrator FROM: Sue Iverson, Director of Finance and Administrative Services SUBJECT: 2014 Proposed Preliminary Budget Personnel Headcount Changes BACKGROUND Since 2009, the Finance department has had an intern as part of its budget and increased its headcount by one in 2010, with the hiring of the Finance Analyst. We have also used interns in Administration, Planning and Zoning and Engineering for the past three years as well as student workers. When Finance and Administrative Services was reorganized in 2010, Finance had been using 2 interns or 1.5 FTEs which we reduced to 0.5 FTEs when the Finance Analyst was added as a full-time position. With the addition of the Administrative Services staff, this increased the FTEs in the new combined budget to 0.85 FTEs which accounted for interns and student workers in Administration who helped at the front desk and with scanning and clerical tasks. See the Finance and Administration's Mission Statement and Organizational Chart attached. CURRENT SITUATION Using interns has become unproductive in the Finance and Administrative Services department except for "special projects" like last year's rate study. We have found that for those types of projects, we can direct them to work on a certain project and they can do the research and data compilation that takes workload off our regular staff; it does however, pose a problem with everyday processes and tasks as staff has to take considerable time to train them on our processes and monitor their work until they understand what they are doing. This is unproductive to our department as we can only keep them for a certain amount of time due to PERA laws, school schedules limit hours, and many times they are not available when we actually need them to do the work, it also puts us in a constant training loop. This leaves the permanent staff no time to work on other projects or to have the backup front desk coverage needed for meeting, training, special projects, and PTO schedules. Adding a part-time position of 20 hours a week would give us the capability to hire someone who wants a part-time schedule, would always be available on a regular basis. Once trained this person could do the repetitious tasks of inputting payroll, accounts payable, cash receipts, utility billing, scanning, front desk support, agenda packets, and general clerical support.