This summer, three leadership positions at the city were vacated. What is being done to keep staff?
In the last year, the City of Moab has hired a number of new staff in leadership positions. The city’s police chief, Jared Garcia, is leaving at the end of September to pursue a role as the executive deputy director at Utah Department of Corrections—his position will be taken over by current assistant chief Alexander Bell. In June, Annie McVay, the city’s parks, recreation, and trails director, and Ben Billingsley, the city’s finance director, left their positions.
Each person left to pursue a new job, home base, or to focus on family life, they each said in official statements. City Manager Carly Castle said when someone leaves a position at the city, there’s a succession plan in place: Bell could take over as police chief, McVay stayed on in a part-time role as the city went through the hiring process, Billingsley also helped onboard David Everitt to take on financial director duties before someone started in a permanent role.
“Succession planning is extremely important for the ongoing functionality of an organization as complicated as the city,” Castle said. “Each department director is tasked with succession planning for their respective departments so when a department director departs there is a smooth transition.”
Castle said the city’s human resources department “uses a variety of outreach options to ensure positions are advertised to as broad an audience as possible”; according to the city’s website, jobs are posted on the city’s employment portal and on the Utah Department of Workforce Services website. A Google search also showed open positions—such as the finance director position—on job finding websites like Indeed, LinkedIn, Salary.com, and Upward.Careers.
In December, the city purchased a duplex, located on 500 E., to provide transitional housing for city employees. The two units in the duplex are available to employees on a six-month lease; when the city purchased it, staff wrote in a city council agenda memo that “the city has difficulty recruiting quality candidates for these positions because of a lack of available housing, and the City also has difficulty retaining employees who lose their housing mid-employment.”
All city employees are eligible to lease the units when they’re available. So the city’s hiring process suffers from the same woes seen across Moab: it’s difficult to bring highly-qualified candidates here when there’s a housing shortage. When the council discussed buying the duplex during a December meeting, both Billingsley and Garcia said they had difficulty finding housing for their families in Moab when they were hired.
Castle said the city has a few policies in place concerning employee retention: the city offers robust benefits (health, vision, and dental insurance, and retirement funds), offers paid time off and paid sick leave, offers a housing stipend for police officers, work-from-home flexibility, and a flexible work schedule, so many employees work nine hours Monday through Thursday and four on Friday.
The city offers competitive salaries: according to Transparent Utah (www.transparent.utah.gov), in the 2023 fiscal year, Jared Garcia was the highest-paid employee (benefits and wages totaling $270,339), followed by Ben Billingsley ($236,120), Carly Castle ($229,213), and Aaron Woodward (a police sergeant, $218,521).
Castle prioritizes staff cohesion too, she said—the city holds quarterly staff meetings and bimonthly department head meetings.
“City leadership establishes the tone for a respectful and supportive workplace,” she said. “Accountability in the workplace is also imperative and city leadership works to help all employees understand how important it is that each person perform their job duties with integrity and responsibility.”
