Jeanette DeForge -masslive.com
SPRINGFIELD — Finding a job was difficult but acquiring a home was easy when the City Council strengthened the residency requirement to demand nearly every city employee live within its borders
Some 15 years later, the issues have flipped, leaving officials discussing if it is time to give the rule another look.
“In 2010 if you said you couldn’t buy a house in Springfield people would laugh at you, now it is just the opposite,” said City Council President Michael Fenton. “At the time people would do anything for a stable job, but now jobs are everywhere.”
The City Council is simply in the discussion phase. There is no formal proposal on the table, but councilors recently held an informal meeting with staff asking them for pros and cons of how the requirement impacts city operations and employees’ personal lives.
The rule covers all employees, except for most school staff. Some union contracts allow employees to live outside Springfield. For example, the police and fire agreements permit employees with 10 years of seniority to relocate to another community, Fenton said.
Employees who worked in Springfield before the changes in the residency requirements are grandfathered in so they can live where they chose, he said.
Last week Fenton and Caitlyn Julius, deputy director of human resources, unveiled a preliminary and informal survey that compares residency requirements and department head salaries with a handful of other communities during a meeting of the Residency Committee.
The survey shows Springfield’s entry-level salaries for a variety of positions top those in six other surrounding communities including Chicopee, Pittsfield and Westfield. The annual pay in many cases is $5,000 to $10,000 more in Springfield.
The survey includes positions such as clerks, police officers, firefighters and drivers. In some cases, jobs such as purchasing agent are not the same in each community because agents in smaller towns and cities often have additional responsibilities, Julius said.
At the same time residency requirements in surrounding communities are more lenient and typically cover limited jobs. For example, Holyoke’s requirement only covers some department head positions, while in Pittsfield only the police and fire chiefs must live in the city, and the building inspector must reside within 10 miles of the city, Fenton said.
“This data shows me … you can’t pay people $5,000 or $10,000 more and attract them to the city,” Fenton said.
But Fenton said the city must do far more research about the issue before determining if the residency requirement is making it more difficult to fill jobs and how much of a factor it is.
For example, the city does not have a formal schedule that allows some people to work from home even for a few days a week, and many jobs call for employees to work in person with the public, he said.
“Are we scapegoating the residency requirement when there are so many facets to this?” Fenton said. “We may conclude it is a red herring or it is a real workforce issue?”
Employees must submit residency certificates annually, and a count of them shows of the 1,126 submitted this year, 77% were residents. Most of those who lived outside the city were either exempt due to grandfather clauses or contract agreements.
Currently, there are about 40 people on waivers, but those can be granted only by the mayor and after a hearing by the Residency Committee when an employee is hired. In the case where someone does receive a waiver, the city first must repost the job to ensure there is no other qualified candidate who lives in or is willing to move to Springfield, he said.
The problem with the strict waiver process is it does not consider changes in people’s lives. For example, employees trying to escape domestic violence are still obligated to remain in Springfield, he said.
But simply eliminating the residency requirement (which Chicopee did in 2014) isn’t easy either since so many employees made a commitment and moved to the city over the past decade.
“There is the question of fairness,” he said.
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