State services strained as NC struggles to hire government workers

Senior living facilities without enough support care. Months-long waits for DMV appointments. Fewer state troopers keeping roads free of drunk drivers.

Thousands of jobs remain open across North Carolina’s state government, hampering its ability to offer basic services to one of the fastest-growing states in the nation. It comes as workers are harder to find in many sectors, not just government, leading to competition for talent as the state’s unemployment rate hovers near a 10-year-low.

At the start of the fiscal year, at least 20 state departments, offices and boards were grappling with the highest number of vacant positions in five years, according to data provided to WRAL by the state Office of Human Resources. Vacancies in at least a dozen of those groups were at 10-year highs, including some that saw vacancies increase by more than 1,000 positions since the middle of 2021.

Complicating things: North Carolina’s population has grown almost 10% in the past 10 years, according to U.S. Census estimates, but many state agencies haven't grown with the population.

“Every time a new business comes here, you have more people who move here and expect services,” said Jill Lucas, a spokeswoman for the state Office of Human Resources. “You have more people who send kids to school and expect teachers to be there. You have more people who expect whatever it is the state provides.”

Government agencies are doing what they can to minimize the staffing shortage on daily operations, with the state implementing new policies to lure job candidates and keep existing employees.

For certain positions, “we’re all recruiting the same talent pool,” Lucas said. “And we've got to find ways to stand out.”

The Highway Patrol is able to provide coverage across the state despite having nearly 200 vacancies, according to Sgt. Marcus Bethea of the patrol’s communications office. On occasion, though, the agency needs to cancel nonessential activities just to keep the roads monitored.

While many troopers are out enforcing laws, some have other specialized roles, including some who give presentations to the public about traffic safety. “There's been moments where we've taken them away from that and put them back on the road to answer calls for service,” Bethea said.

For years state government jobs were highly coveted. They paid reasonable wages, the benefits were good and positions were largely protected from economic downturns. But, with the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, vacancies rose. Then, as the economy kicked back into gear, state governments struggled to compete with the private sector for labor.

“Basically, since COVID, we've been dealing with unprecedented numbers of vacancies, just across the board,” said Amanda Olive, human resources director for the state Department of Transportation. The department’s vacancy rate is just under 22%, she said, and in recent years the rate has been between 15% and 18%. The department had 2,528 openings at the start of the fiscal year, up 32% from the middle of 2019, state data show.

What's causing long DMV lines? A number of things, including you

Entry-level jobs that can be physically demanding — such as DMV clerks, health techs who work with seniors or psychiatric patients, people who work on road crews — have been especially hard to fill. In many cases, those employees can make comparable salaries working jobs in retail or fast food, state officials told WRAL.

And government work can be taxing and thankless: Driver's license examiners regularly deal with customers who are angry about something, for instance. The clerks often “have to tell them, ‘Hey, your documentation isn't correct, or you didn't bring in the right thing,’” Olive said. Even if the customer is disruptive, DMV employees “have to get in the car with these individuals that may not be the best trained when it comes to driving.”

Many health department employees, meanwhile, work in psychiatric hospitals and residential care facilities, working around the clock in trying situations, said Kody Kinsley, secretary of the state Department of Health and Human Services.

That has led to burnout, which has caused employees to quit. The health department has seen one of the biggest increases in vacancies since the onset of the pandemic.

The department had 4,379 openings at the start of the fiscal year, almost twice the total in the middle of 2019. More than one-quarter of the department’s positions were vacant in December, Kinsley said.

“What's happening there is happening across our health care system, where a lot of people retired and a lot of people said, ‘You know, I can't take this. I need to do something different,’” Kinsley said. “It’s not sustainable for the really important mission work that we have to do in serving children, serving families, helping with mental health, and all of our key functions that impact every North Carolinian every day.”

Legislators last year provided agencies with some money to raise pay and provide managers with more flexibility to offer signing and retention bonuses.

Lawmakers provided state agencies a 1% boost in their budget to use for recruitment and retention efforts, an effort that cost a total of $67 million. Some agencies are also exploring new recruitment methods. In the meantime, though, government services are stretched thin.

As more private employers open shop in North Carolina, state lawmakers believe they’ll need to improve the governments’ job offerings in order to compete. “Some businesses have seemed to weather that better, and I’m trying to figure out exactly what the levers are that they’ve been working,” Senate Leader Phil Berger, R-Rockingham, said in an interview.

State economists expect North Carolina to collect $33.76 billion for the fiscal year ending June 30. That’s $3.25 billion, or 10.7%, more than expected.

Berger declined to speculate on how much additional money lawmakers will send government agencies in this year’s spending plan. Berger does expect lawmakers to grant raises, though, and says departments with severe employment problems may receive additional assistance.

"We’ve done a really good job of growing the economy in North Carolina,” Berger said. “We’ve got to find a way to make sure we’ve got enough people to fill those jobs.”

The budget talks are closely watched by state employees as their department representatives make a case for more funding.

The state’s Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention division is seeking funding to boost pay for longtime employees, said William Lassiter, the Department of Public Safety’s deputy secretary of juvenile justice, who leads the program. He referred to it as a “step plan” that would help with retention by guaranteeing annual raises. Without it, he faces an employee flight risk.

Some juvenile justice employees heard that division leaders were requesting the plan, and they held out hope that it would be approved in last year’s budget. But it wasn’t.

“When it did not come to fruition,” Lassiter said, “we started to lose more people.”

In some positions, the vacancy rate jumped from about 30% to more than 40%, Lassiter said.

The state’s public safety department entered the fiscal year with 6,500 vacancies, more than any other agency. For years, the state has had trouble finding people to work as correctional officers and juvenile care staff.

In order to provide more staffing inside prisons, the Department of Adult Correction has spent more than $9 million this fiscal year using a private security contractor to provide perimeter security.

“That frees up state correctional officers to work with offenders inside the prisons,” said Keith Acree, the department’s communications director.

And it’s doing so at a higher cost. The state is paying a contractor more for perimeter security than it would pay if it paid state employees to do the same job, Acree said.

The juvenile justice division is also extremely short staffed, Lassiter said. The division is responsible for housing, educating and rehabilitating minors who have been charged or convicted of a crime.

“I've never seen vacancy rates anywhere near this level,” said Lassiter, who has been working in juvenile justice for almost 25 years.

Half of the division’s direct care positions — “the staff that every day interact with those kids so they can get out of their rooms,” he said — are vacant.

Meanwhile, the demand for juvenile justice services is growing. When Lassiter spoke to WRAL earlier this month, he said the state’s facilities were 22 kids over capacity. To properly staff juvenile facilities, the state has called in juvenile counselors from its courtrooms and sent staffers from its central control office.

“I've even worked the floor in our juvenile justice facilities because we were so short staffed,” Lassiter said. “It’s an all-hands-on-deck approach. We're actually using a lot of our clinical staff, like our social workers and psychologists, to work on the floor.”

“Lots of people are doing jobs that are well outside their normal scope of duty,” he said.

The employees who work with juveniles play instrumental roles not only in helping the children but also in protecting taxpayers and potentially saving them money. If the juvenile centers are effective in helping their patients, many of whom suffer from mental illness, they can reenter society and succeed. That means less crime and potentially less of the state’s money spent on judicial proceedings and detention.

But for many, Lassiter said, the government isn’t offering enough to make the job worthwhile.

“For our youth behavior specialist, you have to have either a four-year degree or four years of experience working with this population,” he said. “And so to start at $35,000, we're competing against Target and Walmart … and it's just really difficult to compete in this environment at that low of a salary.”

The public sector isn’t alone in this conundrum. Businesses and organizations of all kinds are wrestling with how to recruit competent workers. The reasons are many: Aging workers are retiring. High child care costs are keeping some parents at home. And there’s burnout created from juggling work-from-home responsibilities with family life.

NC's child care crunch threatens workforce, getting big business' attention

In North Carolina, the state’s strong economy also plays a factor. When private-sector companies expand, they compete for workers with other employers, including the state. And it’s slim pickings: The state’s unemployment rate was 3.9% in December, among the lowest in the past 10 years.

Even if every unemployed worker was connected with an available job in North Carolina, there would still be nearly 160,000 open positions and no one to fill them, according to figures from the U.S. Department of Commerce.

It’s difficult for the state to compete with private companies. The private sector can more easily — and quickly — adjust salaries and offers to compete for talent, and to retain existing employees. The state has less flexibility.

Government pay scales are set by elected officials and special approval is needed to offer wages outside those specified ranges. Businesses, on the other hand, can raise the price of their products or tinker with other operations to offset rising labor costs.

“The private sector can move quickly and respond to economic realities rapidly,” said Mike Walden, an economist at N.C. State University. “The public sector responds much more slowly, and often only after long debates and discussion.”

“Most of what the public sector delivers is done without a direct fee paid by the ‘customer,’” Walden said.

5 reasons for the continuing worker shortage

The government is also limited in how quickly it can hire people. In the juvenile justice department, for instance, Lassiter said the hiring process can take more than three months. He said some applicants must pass a background check, a psychological assessment and a physical. Then the paperwork goes to a commission that determines whether a candidate is eligible for the position they’re seeking.

“So a lot of times in the process while we're trying to hire somebody, [another employer] will come along and offer them either better salary or a job immediately … and we lose those candidates,” Lassiter said. Last year at the division’s facility in Cabarrus County, the division interviewed 220 people over six months.

“By the time they got to the hiring process, we only were able to hire 12 of them,” he said.

To solve the problem, the state has offered signing bonuses for some of the hardest-to-fill jobs. They’ve also begun offering more flexible roles, enabling some employees to work from home or have hybrid schedules. And there’s a pilot program for referral bonuses, giving cash to existing employees who help recruit workers to state jobs.

As a result of the efforts, the state is starting to see signs of stabilization in turnover, but headcount continues to decline, according to Lucas, the state human resources spokeswoman.

North Carolina’s agencies are starting to think outside the box, too. Olive, the DOT spokeswoman, said the transportation and education departments are planning a new apprenticeship program for high schoolers that will offer paths to employment in the transportation industry.

“We're really, really excited about it,” Olive said. “We started out with one or two districts being interested. … Then, all of a sudden, we have 51 districts that were, like, ‘Hey, let's do this.’”

The program will resemble those already offered by transportation construction companies, Olive said.

“We were able to convince our leaders across that government that this can be a great thing for us,” she said. “And our management at DOT was completely supportive and on board and ready to make this happen.”

Even if state agencies fill their current openings, new ones are expected to open in the coming years.

One long-standing appeal of government work: the ability to retire with a pension. And those pensions can grow substantially, depending on how long employees stay in their government roles.

So some employees stay in their positions for a long time. And, when they retire, it can leave a knowledge void. That’s what some department heads fear is next.

Currently, 8.5% of state employees are eligible to retire with full, unreduced benefits. In five years, that number will jump to 26%.

“We're really at a very important moment here,” said Kinsley, the health secretary. “We desperately need to reconstitute our workforce, bring more people back into the workplace to do this work, and do the information sharing necessary to sustain this work over time.”