The Kenai City Council passed a resolution that would amend the city’s Classification Plan by changing the ranges of temporary parks and recreation and personal use fishery positions. it would consolidate the six temporary summer positions into four positions and amend the hourly pay for these positions so that they are comparable to positions in places of public employment on the Kenai Peninsula.
City Manager Paul Ostrander told council:
“What we had with our temporary workers was disparate levels of compensation which made it really difficult, for example, parks and recreation, to fill those positions because some of these other positions paid so much more. What this resolution does do is it creates an equitable payment schedule for these employees so that all of them should be equally attractive, but it also does overall increase the wages to make us more competitive with other surrounding municipalities.”
In recent years, the Parks and Recreation Department, Finance Department, and the Streets Division of the Public Works Department have been responsible for recruiting the temporary summer positions for the Personal Use Fishery. In addition to the Personal Use Fishery, the Parks and Recreation Department recruits for multiple temporary summer maintenance positions, resulting in several recruitments posting at the same time and City departments competing for many of the same applicants.
Ostrander spoke on the likelihood of filling the open positions this summer:
“I certainly hope we will. This gets us much more competitive than we have in the past. I will tell you over the past couple of years, we’ve really struggled, particularly on the Parks and Rec side to fill these summer positions. We’ve been able to fill all the positions within the Personal Use Fishery since I’ve been here, but we really struggled with Parks and Recreation. It was actually a collaborative effort between our new Parks & Recreation Director, Brad Walker and our HR Director, Christine Cunningham, to come up with these ranges and what makes sense. I’m reasonably confident that we’ll be able to fill these positions this year.”
Since the resolution passed, the Parks and Recreation department now can begin recruiting to fill its temporary summer maintenance positions as well as beginning recruitment for positions in support of the Personal Use Fishery at the proposed salary ranges.
