Public Notice: Drowning in Paperwork

It's that time of year when the city Parks and Recreation Department is traditionally filling the mailboxes and airwaves with pleas for lifeguard candidates, sounding increasingly desperate as the opening day for city pools draws nearer. That's no different this year – PARD's Aquatics Division is offering a pay boost to $20 per hour, with flexible schedules and scholarships available for training sessions – but what's new to the discussion is some added scrutiny on the hiring process itself, in the form of a Special Report from the Office of the City Auditor, delivered in March in response to a request from last year by former City Council Member Kathie Tovo and current CM Leslie Pool.

CMs Chito Vela and José Velásquez requested a briefing last week on the audit and the hiring process. PARD has not yet scheduled that, but meanwhile, there are a few interesting talking points in the report, starting with the top-line numbers: With PARD needing 860 total lifeguards to fully staff all pools, they were at just 75% of that at the end of the summer 2022 season. (And the numbers had been worse at the beginning of the season; on June 10, PARD posted that they had "444 lifeguards ready to work" and fewer than half of the city's pools were open.) The report doesn't really address recruiting itself – how could we get more applicants? – and I expect that's something Council members are going to want to look at; they already decreed that pay raise to the city minimum wage of $20 and may want to ask what other outreach efforts are going on. But the auditors focused solely on the people who did apply.

Overall, given the number of ongoing and returning employees, PARD needed to hire 636 lifeguards for the 2022 summer season and had 1,100 qualified applicants, who passed the first screening through the city job portal (eCareer) and were manually entered into a system known as TOPS, newly created by PARD Human Resources to manage the hiring of temporary employees. The auditors found another 52 applications that never made it into the TOPS system, and no one seemed to know quite why; also, there was a known scheduling glitch that caused the city job portal to send out rejection notices to 95% of the applicants. In the end, only 422 people completed all steps in the hiring process and were officially hired, and of those, only 376 worked at least one hour during the summer. And of the 680 or so who didn't get hired, most were eliminated because they failed to finish the required paperwork, or to pass a criminal background check, or to complete the lifeguard certification course. The auditors make no effort to delve into that or opine on whether that's a normal dropout rate, but that too is something CMs may inquire about during their briefing.

Meanwhile, if you or someone you know wants to apply, that part's pretty easy: Just go to lifeguardaustin.com.

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Council is already meeting today – I'll bet they started at 10am sharp because Kirk Watson runs a tight ship – and they do so again next Thursday, April 20. This week: Make Rainey Street safer! Next week: scooters, too! Plus "low-embodied­-carbon concrete."

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