The Soldotna City Council adopted a resolution amending a job title and reclassifying a position, in addition to adding a regular part-time assistant and amending the FY23 authorized staffing table to reflect the changes. The city states that positions occasionally need to be reviewed and reorganized to best meet the needs of the organization and the community.
City Manager Stephanie Queen said:
“My goal with this reorganization is to add capacity. It adds effectively a half-time, a 0.5 of a full-time position. It also separates HR duties from the finance department. The existing finance position would be reclassified to a higher range. It would be given higher levels of responsibility and I think that would start building within our organization some legacy planning so that the #2 person could now be this accountant who would be able to cross train with Melanie (Imholte) on more complicated and sophisticated finance tasks like audit prep, like grant reporting. The goal of the position is to build more depth within the finance department, while at the same time really giving more resources to Human Resources. Jessica (O’Reagan) would remain the HR manager, but we would propose a new part-time position to be her assistant.”
The ‘Account Clerk IV- Payroll/HR Assistant’ position performs a wide range of Finance duties as well as provides support to the HR Manager, according to the city. The existing job description and department staffing levels were reviewed by the Finance Director, HR Manager and City Manager and they recommended separating the current position into two separate positions; one in Finance and one in HR. In addition, they recommended re-titling the ‘Account Clerk IV’ position in Finance to ‘Accountant’ and increasing the level of responsibility and essential job duties, in addition to adding a regular part-time ‘HR Assistant’ dedicated to providing support for the HR Manager.
Queen stated that the department grew over the years, despite staffing remaining the same, including that separating the departments and adding a half time employee will benefit the needs of both departments and the city.
Queen wrote in memo documents that the changes will better meet the needs of the Finance and HR functions of the city and more effectively support other city departments.