[Archived] Is there a new practice of budgeting for vacancy factors within the departments?

The City’s practice is to budget vacancy factors by department in order to reflect the true estimated personnel cost for each department. In some past years, a City-wide adjustment to the vacancy factor was placed in the Non-Departmental budget in the proposed budget and redistributed to departments in the approved budget, as was also the case with some City-wide salary and benefit adjustments. Departments calculate their vacancy factor based on historical turnover trends and expected hiring. The Finance Department is working aggressively to fill a number of vacancies, but does not expect to have done so by the end of FY 2016 and has adjusted its vacancy factor for the FY 2017 budget accordingly.