http://youtu.be/G-V1Uf341Wg
Dona Ana County is struggling with low staffing problems throughout the county, forcing the temporary closure of the Juvenile Detention Center. Another struggling department is the Dona Ana County Sheriff’s office.
With over 50 positions to fill, Dona Ana County Sheriff Enrique “Kiki” Vigil watched as new applicants complete their fitness test. He says they aren’t having a problem recruiting applicants, and that the problem is with the County’s human resources department.
“There’s a bottleneck there in HR,” Vigil said. “There is a processor that does all the processing of all the applicant’s that have been applying to the sheriff’s department and there is a bottleneck that has been created there. Presently we have close to 300 applicants that have applied, and the process is just too slow. So, what HR needs to do is, they need to hire another person or two more personnel to assist the processing, or reassign personnel to help out, but that is the problem that’s happening right now.”
Vigil says his office gets calls every week from applicants asking when they will hear back, He says when they tried to schedule someone for a fit test they found he’d been hired by the state police.
“He applied for the sheriff’s department,” Vigil said. “It took really long for the HR to get back with him, to even follow up, so we lost him, the state police has him on board. And we’re losing folks like that.”
According to a Dona Ana County Spokesperson, 298 people have applied to the Sheriff’s office, and 217 of those applications were sent to the Sheriff’s office in order to schedule the fitness tests and written tests. At a Dona Ana County Commission work session on May 5th, County Manager Julia Brown addressed the Sheriff’s concerns saying HR wasn’t broken.
“With respect to there being applicant’s who are waiting for HR to process something,” Brown said. “That does not jibe with the information that I have. We do know that there are some certified law enforcement officers who have applied, and we’ve been trying to get a response from the Sheriff about being able to move those people forward in the process and have not gotten responses on those.”
Brown suggested there was a communication problem with the sheriff’s office.
“Communication certainly is a good thing,” Brown said. “Even if we have to come to a work session in order for the Sheriff to respond to inquiries that we have made to them. It is good for example to learn from the Sheriff just now that they have conducted their own jobs fairs. We have not been aware that they had job fairs going on or that they had some coming up. And it’s good to hear that they don’t believe they need a recruiter, we will stop sending emails asking them to respond to that, now that we know that.”
Sheriff Vigil says that is not the case.
“For her to say that we haven’t been meeting with HR, we do that on a weekly basis,” Vigil said. “We have our meetings at the sheriff’s department, where they have one of their HR personnel attend our meetings on a weekly basis, on Monday. So we have been in communication with them, but for her to say that we have not, that is wrong.”
Vigil says he plans to ask the County Commission for their own HR person to help speed up the process.
Dona Ana County will be holding a job fair on May 15th to help address the shortages next week, focusing special attention on the Detention Center and Sheriff’s office vacancies.
