Concord City Council unanimously approved $400,000 for weekly bonuses for snow removal employees this winter, as Concord’s public works director said they had stemmed the outflow of CDL employees after an “exodus” ahead of last winter.

The money funds $300 per week for “staff available and related to winter operations for city streets, sidewalks, and airport,” or, generally, staff with commercial driver licenses deployed for winter storm cleanup, according to a city report. Other staff who do clean up but who do not have that license will receive $150 per week. The payments will run from the beginning of December to the end of March, totaling $5,100 and  $2,550 per person, respectively, for the whole winter.

The payments, as well as a program where the city pays for new plow drivers to get their commercial licenses, are aimed at attracting and retaining employees in an economy where pay in the private sector is often higher. The city currently has a team of 56 of the 67 it needs for a full winter operations staff. But almost a dozen of those are employees that have CDLs but who have not previously driven snow plows and still need training. When the department requested the stipends last year, it had 18 winter operations vacancies.

A dry labor pool of commercially licensed employees has been a worry for the last several years. Training reimbursement and winter stipends helped to stem the tide of turnover last year, but don’t make the city immune from industry-wide shortages, General Services Director Chip Chesley told the city council at its November meeting.

“As soon as we put the program in place last winter that bleed that we were experiencing of people just leaving the department stopped,” he said, noting that last winter only one supervisory employee left during the stipend period. “So I think it was a very smart investment.”

Concord’s recruitment of truck or plow drivers includes onboarding people who don’t yet have their commercial licenses. As an incentive, the city pays $5,500 for these hires to secure training and to pass the test, which takes between three and four months, the report stated. Training newly-licensed employees in the city’s winter operations work then takes another two to three months.

New hires who sign on to this training reimbursement program are required to stay on staff for 18 months, according to Human Resources Director Jennifer Johnston.

“My big concern,” Chesley continued, “is the fact that that group of operators — CDL operators — we lose them in four to five years. … I don’t know what other level of people that we have in our 450 workforce that has that short a fuse.”

It means that his department is “continually” trying to recruit more drivers.

The issue is not unique to Concord. The state Department of Transportation offers a $5,000 retention bonus for its plow drivers if they stay on board through the end of the winter season.

The city typically has seen between 25 and 30 total storms requiring some kind of road treatment in recent years, City Manager Tom Aspell said. Last year there were only 19, and of those, the number requiring snow removal and parking bans downtown was in the low single digits.

At Concord City Council’s December meeting, it will contemplate another $405,000 for retention efforts at the city police department.

Last October, city leaders approved $505,000 to fund retention initiatives for police. It paid for an increase in overtime pay from time-and-a-half to double-time that lasted through mid-February and provided each officer who stayed on staff through April with a $5,000 bonus.

In an interview just after the retention bonuses were awarded, Chief Bradley Osgood told the Monitor that the department would be seeking funding to continue the retention bonus program. The overtime bump had been effective at increasing morale, but was more of a temporary “stop-gap” need, he said.

The police department requested $400,000 for a retention line item in the current budget, but it wasn’t included in the final appropriation. It appears the request is headed to the council now, which would bring the department’s total budget for the year to over $16 million.

The report does not outline exactly how the $405,000 will be dispersed to officers, but it is intended for “police officer retention and retroactive overtime wage payments” that will “reward our current sworn employees who have taken on a drastically increased workload during this staffing crisis.”

But it doesn’t appear the retention bonuses have slowed departures among police as much as they did among general services employees.

Last October when the city council approved the retention money, the department reported 11 vacancies in a staff of 90 sworn officers, a 12% vacancy rate. In April, that figure had grown to 13. Now, the department’s vacancy rate has jumped to 21%, or 19 openings, according to a report attached to the funding request.

Catherine McLaughlin can be reached at cmclaughlin@cmonitor.com