East Lansing Faces Lasting Impact from City Staff Turnover

Staffing turnover has been a central concern in East Lansing city government in recent years, as departures have drained the city ranks of talent and experience.

These departures are largely responsible for some of the most visible local issues, and the city is still working to find long term fits for several recently vacated positions.

Right now, East Lansing is operating with interim directors leading its library, fire department, clerk’s office and parks and recreation department. Earlier this year, the police department and finance department each chose new leaders. Outside of DEI Director Elaine Hardy and Court Administrator Nicole Evans, no department head has been in their role for more than two years (excluding time spent as interim director).

City Manager Robert Belleman, who took over as the top East Lansing employee in September 2023, said he thinks staffing is starting to stabilize. He pointed out that most of the recent key departures have been older employees retiring, which is different from disgruntled employees leaving for a new job. 

Still, the departures – both prior to Belleman’s tenure and more recently – have an impact on city operations and Belleman attributes some of the city’s most glaring problems to staffing challenges. 

He said there were many employees who left in 2022 and 2023 that worked on road projects. These departures are partially responsible for the many complaints about traffic that the city has received.

“Some of the complaints that we heard were ‘I emailed about this two or three years ago,’” Belleman said. “Well you may have, but there was no one down there to answer it. So it never got answered or it never got addressed.”

Additionally, Belleman said the city has had trouble enforcing its traffic laws because police shortages have thinned ELPD’s road patrol. 

“The police department took a huge hit after George Floyd [protests] in 2020,” Belleman said. “A lot of people didn’t want to go into law enforcement, and so we had turnover, we had huge vacancies.” 

Police staffing is improving. Belleman said Police Chief Jen Brown recently told him the police department does not have any postings for vacant positions, likely for the first time since 2018 or 2019.

There will be ongoing challenges due to the loss of internal knowledge and young employees taking over some of the city’s most complicated roles. 

“We’re a very slim organization and we have a lot of new team members that we’re still trying to bring up to speed,” Belleman said. “Engineering is an example. They are a pretty young department and lack the experience that was there before the departure of everyone.

“When you had Nicole [McPherson], Ron [Lacasse] and Scott [House], they all knew collectively the history of things, and they knew how to respond to stuff very quickly,” he continued. “We still don’t have that fully built, and so that is slowing us down.”

City engineers work on capital improvement projects, like upgrades to city streets, and the sewer and stormwater management systems. 

Inexperience can also slow the development process, Belleman said, as city staff members work with developers to usher in new projects. However, it can take time to learn all the city standards, permitting rules and ordinances that must be accounted for in new developments.

Along with turnover, there have been challenges recruiting new employees. Belleman said the city had to post the chief financial officer job twice before Audrey Kincade agreed to take the role. The clerk position has been posted since shortly after former Clerk Marie Wicks retired late last year, and the city has struggled to find engineers, paramedics and accountants. 

Belleman does not think the city’s pension packages are hurting recruitment and retention. He explained that the city offers hybrid pension packages to most full-time employees. These packages are more lucrative than the defined contribution packages offered by most municipalities. Additionally, the city’s police and fire employees are offered defined benefit packages that are considered “the cream of the crop.”

Within the next few months, the city will wrap up a wage and benefit study to ensure East Lansing is offering competitive compensation. The study may find the city needs to offer higher wages to keep employees. 

As the city works to address significant financial challenges, Belleman said it will be worth it to continue to offer more expensive pension packages and increase pay, if the study finds that is needed.

“I look at it this way, we can’t afford not to,” he said. “East Lansing is a very slim organization, but robust. There’s not a lot of fat in personnel.”

Councilmember Mark Meadows was first elected to council in 1995 and has served on council on-and-off ever since. During his time on council, he has not seen anything like the turnover the city has experienced the last few years. 

He said some of the departures have been softened by experienced staff members being promoted from within to lead their department, pointing to Planning, Building and Development Director Annette Irwin, Department of Public Works Director Ron Lacasse and Chief Financial Officer Audrey Kincade. 

“If your organization is operating correctly… you’re hoping that you always have the number two in command, [their] next step is to take the place of number one when they leave,” he said. “So you build succession into each department, and we haven’t always been successful in doing that.”

Meadows said the repercussions of not retaining secondary employees can be seen in the city’s planning and zoning division, which was nearly empty after a wave of departures in 2023. The division now has healthy staffing but is light on experience. 

“When [Principal Planner] Landon [Bartley] was hired, we were down to, like Landon and a secretary,” Meadows said. “Now you can go in there and every office is filled, but nobody in there has more than like six months of experience besides Landon.” 

Getting employees in the planning division up to speed is important because cities have different processes for things like permitting, Meadows explained. 

Cities around Michigan are losing employees to the private sector. It isn’t an easy problem to fix. 

East Lansing is far from the only municipality grappling with turnover. Cities around Michigan are struggling to hang on to workers.

“It’s something we’re seeing all across the state,” said Anthony Minghine, deputy executive director of the Michigan Municipal League. “Local governments are having a much more difficult time attracting and retaining folks.”

In recent years, more municipal employees have been leaving for the private sector. Previously, it was more common for these employees to move up the ranks in the city they worked for, Minghine said. 

“Government, I think in general, has become more challenging for folks to work in,” he said. “I think some folks are just choosing to try to do something else… A lot of those skillsets are transferable.” 

Minghine thinks it’s more challenging to work in government right now because the positions are more public-facing and less appreciated than in past decades. 

“Social media and other things can sometimes make it more difficult to be effective in those positions,” he said. “It can wear on folks.”

The private sector also enjoys advantages in hiring and retention, like fewer budget constraints and the ability to set up more flexible work schedules. 

Minghine said local governments can work to offset these advantages by having a healthy political environment and positive workplace culture.

“Sometimes the economics are such that you have to make moves, but a good culture goes a long way to keep people on the team and pushing the same direction,” he said.  

Belleman acknowledges that there are always going to be challenges with staffing. But he is confident in the team being built in East Lansing. 

“I think we are building a cohesive team, I just hope no one retires,” he said with a smile. “I joked last Monday with my staff, I said ‘I’ve given up on the concept that we’ll always be fully staffed at any one point in time.’

“That would be ideal, I don’t know if I can achieve it.”