 Hey everyone, good afternoon and welcome to the Center for Local, State, and Urban Policy's webinar on Local Government Workforce Issues. My name is Deborah Horner and I'm a researcher at the University of Michigan's Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. I'd like to ask that we all wait just a couple seconds here just to give everyone who is joining us time to log in and get settled. And in the meantime, please check your speaker volume. Also, I just want to warn you ahead of time that we had some mysterious intermittent network connection problems here on campus in Ann Arbor yesterday. And although we're hoping that they've been solved, if something happens and we should suddenly disappear, it's probably not you, it's us. All right, let's see. Okay, let's go ahead and get started. Again, my name is Deborah and I'm a project manager here at the University of Michigan with the Center for Local, State, and Urban Policy or close up. My colleague Natalie Fitzpatrick and I will be sharing with you today findings from a recent survey of Michigan local officials about challenges facing their local government's workforce. First of all, I want to tell you just a little bit about the Survey Research Program, the Michigan Public Policy Survey, where the data will be talking about comes from. Many of you local officials listening are probably familiar since you've probably answered a number of our survey waves in the past. After this quick introduction, I want to review some of our findings from the spring 2017 wave conducted this last April through June that looked at a range of issues related to local government personnel, including, first, some data that was not in the written report that we released last week. It's a look at local leaders assessments of how positively or negatively they think the public views their government's workforce. We'll also look at trends in employee pay and benefits and the size of jurisdictions workforce. Then Natalie will take over to give you an overview of some of the problems Michigan local officials have told us they're experiencing with their personnel, including recruitment and retention, as well as something that wasn't in our main report, whether and how local governments plan for knowledge transition when their employees leave or retire. And finally, if we time this right, we should have 10 minutes or so left for questions and answers. To facilitate Q&A, so we can get it to as many questions as possible, I'm going to ask that you submit your questions in writing. On your screen in the BlueJeans console off to the right, you should see an icon with a person and a little chat bubble. If you mouse over it, it says moderator chat. If you could please submit your questions there whenever they come to you. We have a couple colleagues here in the office with me that will be collecting those and feeding them our way. If we can quickly address a question right during a topic, we will try, but I expect that most questions will answer at the end. Okay, so let's get started. First off, why don't I briefly explain what is the Michigan Public Policy Survey program? Well, the MPPS is a census survey, meaning we reach out to every single county, township, city and village across the state, all 1800 plus of them. The respondents include top elected officials such as county board chairs and mayors and village presidents, as well as top appointed officials like county administrators and city and village managers. Now townships are unique in that there's only a small percentage across the state that have formal manager positions. So we send the MPPS to both township supervisors and township clerks. Respondents mostly participate in the survey by completing it online, as many of you know. But for those who don't have an email address or quality online access, we provide them with a hard copy in the mail, because we want to make sure that we do not leave any Michigan community out. Over the past nine years of conducting the MPPS, we've covered a wide range of topics, including those related to local government administration and policy, and we ask about employee issues almost every spring. But this past spring contained our largest number of questions on local government workforce yet. One of the things that makes the MPPS unique is that census aspect, but also that we receive back responses from more than 70% of local units across the state, which is pretty extraordinary in survey research. We're also dedicated to transparency and you'll find every question we've ever asked along with tables showing how officials answered and pretty much everything we do up on our website. We also don't just sit here in Ann Arbor and make up the questions by ourselves. We seek feedback from expert advisors across the country and here in Michigan, including people at MML, MTA and MAC. Our hope is that we're really asking the right questions, the ones that will help us inform policymakers about the experiences of local governments in every part of the state, large and small. Speaking of which, as you can see from this slide that's coming up last spring wave, we had more than 1300 unique jurisdictions across the state submit surveys, which is approximately 74% of all of them. Responses are pretty evenly distributed by region, and we also receive close to 70% in each of the different population size categories. And I'm telling you this so that you know that no one area of Michigan one type of local government is overly represented. All of that was just to give you some basic background on how we collect the local government officials' opinions and what this data means. And just as a reminder, if you have questions, you can send them to us by using the moderator chat icon. Over there, off to the right of your screen, that little icon with the head and the little chat bubble. And if I don't answer them now, we'll try to get to them in Q&A. So now that I've introduced the data, let me turn to the questions we asked of respondents this past spring about employee personnel issues. Let's start with the most basic question. Out of the 1856 jurisdictions in the state, which ones even have employees? Statewide, 91% of Michigan's local governments report having some kind of paid employees, full-time, part-time, seasonal or temporary, while 8% say they have none at all. In this chart, we break down those 91% of jurisdictions represented by the big blue column on the left by what type of employees they have. The most common type are regular part-time employees, which 73% of local government statewide have. Meanwhile, about 50% of half of our local units report that they have full-time staff members. Then 38% report employing seasonal workers and 24% report having temporary or irregular employees. And then over there on the left, there's that 8% of local governments with no employees of any kind. Let's break this down by jurisdiction type. If you look over at the left-hand side of this chart at the two sets of columns on the left, you can see that almost all counties and cities have full-time employees. And then among villages statewide, about 78% of them have full-time employees, while only 4% of villages have no employees at all. But when it comes to townships, only 30% of our 1,200-plus townships in the state have full-time employees, while 10% of townships have no paid employees at all. Now, as I mentioned earlier, I want to share with you a bit of data that wasn't included in the written report we released last week. One thing that we asked at the end of our series of questions on workforce issues was for local officials to rate how they think their citizens view their local government's workers. Looking overall, local leaders have a pretty rosy view of whether the public likes their employees. On this chart, the blue colors indicate that officials think the public's perception of their employees is positive, and the green indicates that they think it's negative. Almost a third, 31% of local government leaders think their citizens have a very positive view of their workforce, and almost half, 46%, think it's at least somewhat positive. Meanwhile, that green piece of pie shows that only 8% say their citizens have a somewhat negative view of local government workers in general, and close to none believe the public has a very negative view. Again, this slide breaks down those opinions by jurisdiction type, with the statewide total on the right, and the four kinds of jurisdictions we survey on the left. Officials from townships, cities, and villages report more pretty similar levels of public approval for their workforce. However, among county officials, only about 7% say that their residents have a very positive view of county workers, and only 1 in 5, 20% believe that the public has a negative view of their county's employees. We could also look at these data by jurisdiction size, and here we can see that officials from larger jurisdictions, those with 30,000 residents, one of those middle bars, are somewhat more likely to say their citizens have a negative view of their employees, but it's not as dramatic a difference as the one for counties alone. Alright, now let's talk about employee pay. I bet that's one of the reasons why you're all here. Over the past six years, Michigan local governments have generally been raising pay rates for their employees, but they tell us they've been doing it only incrementally, that is, in mostly slight increases. Looking at this chart, you can see we've tracked increases in pay rates since 2011, that's the column to the far left, all the way up to 2017, that's the column on the far right. Blue shades inside each column indicate where officials told us they've increased employee wages, either somewhat or greatly, while green colors indicate where they've cut employee pay rates. When the MPPS asked if local employee pay rates had increased, decreased, or remained the same compared with the previous fiscal year, in 2011 just 22% of jurisdictions with employees said they had increased their pay rates. By 2015, for the first time since we started tracking an outright majority, 55% of Michigan's local jurisdictions reported increasing their pay rates, and then last year, 58% reported increased pay rates compared to the previous fiscal year. That's a lot of blue, but keep in mind that it's 57% of jurisdictions that say they're increasing pay somewhat, while only 1% greatly. These don't appear to be huge rates as we're talking about here. In addition, even today, eight years after the end of the Great Recession, there are still 41% of local leaders that continue to say they are not changing employee pay rates at all, so there's also a lot of treading water going on around there. Okay, this next slide's quite busy, but let me briefly break it down for you. Here, we're looking at changes in employee pay by jurisdiction size. You can see the legend there across the top of the chart, where the smallest jurisdictions, those with 1,500 residents or fewer, are represented by the green line, and the largest jurisdictions in the state, those with more than 30,000 in population size are represented by the gold line. Every year, we ask whether, looking ahead, officials anticipate their local government will increase employee pay in the next fiscal year, and you can see that in 2017, the trend toward planned pay increases sees its largest jump among the smaller jurisdictions. Meanwhile, planned employee pay increases among units with more than 5,000 residents has been flat since 2015. And although three quarters, about 75% of leaders from the largest jurisdictions, those with that gold line, predict increased employee pay rates in 2017, this is down from 80% in 2016. Now, the question is, do local officials think what they're paying employees is the right amount? Although we saw in the last two slides, Michigan local governments have been reporting bumping their employee pay upwards in recent years. Assessments of whether pay rates are appropriate remain largely unchanged. Back in 2014, that's the middle column on this chart, 70% of local officials and jurisdictions with employees said pay rates for their current employees were about right, that part colored gray. Whilst 26% said they were too low, the part colored blue, and only 3% said they were too high, that's the part in green. In 2017, nearly identical percentages say that their current pay rates are about right, 71%, too low, 25%, and too high, 3%. So there's been some continuing concerns over low pay among a quarter of local officials, while about the same time there's been a trend of pay rate increases. This may indicate that those small boosts and pay rates aren't keeping pace with the needs in these places. Alright, let's turn next to what local leaders told us about their employee benefits packages. So again, we asked a basic question, who offers benefits? The statewide totals are shown in the first two columns over on your left, and you can see from the lighter blue column that just over half, 53% of jurisdictions statewide that have any employees at all offer their benefits to current employees. You can also see that the number of jurisdictions who currently offer benefits are cutting them for new hires. That's the dark blue column, where fewer than half statewide report that they're providing those same benefits to the new hires. Then moving to the right, you can see if the jurisdictions has no full-time employees, only ones that are either part-time or seasonal, only about 8% of those offer current employees benefits, while among those that have some kind of full employees, 86% of those places offer their current employees benefits. Slightly fewer of those with full-time employees, 79% are offering them to their new hires. Once again, we've been tracking several different questions on benefits over time since 2011. For example, when it comes to employee contributions and possible cost reductions in employee healthcare, the MPPS asks if governments are increasing or decreasing the amount they're asking employees to pay toward their own healthcare. As you can see in this chart, the percentage of jurisdictions over time who've been shifting additional healthcare costs to their employees has shrunk. Cost shifting peaked in 2012 at 51% of jurisdictions, and then it was still substantial, 43% in 2014. But it's decreased to 29% of relevant jurisdictions as of the 2017 MPPS. So as of last year, about a third of Michigan jurisdictions are still, year over year, asking employees to pay more on their healthcare premiums, deductibles, and copays. Again, we can look at differences by jurisdiction size to compare what bigger versus smaller places are doing. Quick reminder, smallest in green, largest in gold. Among those jurisdictions that offer benefits to their employees, larger ones are more likely than smaller ones to say they're continuing to shift healthcare costs to employees. In particular, mid-sized jurisdictions in communities with between about 5,000 and 10,000 residents saw a jump in the percentage who are pursuing more cost shifting. You can look at that orange line and see that while in 2016, 29% of mid-sized jurisdictions said they were increasing employees' share of healthcare contributions. In 2017, 42% said they were more in line with the percentage of what the larger jurisdictions are saying. So what do local leaders generally think of the benefits they are providing? Back in 2011, there was a substantial proportion of local officials who thought their benefits packages were too generous. That's the green section of the column on the left. As governments made their move to shift these costs, that trend that we saw in the last slide, this dropped to about 10% of officials saying too generous in 2014. But uh-oh, there was also an increase in 2014 in the number who thought their benefits package was not generous enough. That's the blue section in the middle column. Now, three years later in 2017, we see a small increase in the percentage of officials who say benefits packages are too generous. And a small decrease in those who are saying not generous enough. And evening out since 2014. So now in 2017, more than three quarters of jurisdictions say they have it about right. Next, let's turn to the question of workforce size. That is, do local units have the workforce they need to provide the services they want to provide? I want to jump out of the MPPS data for just a minute here and take a look at some of the numbers from the US Census. These two charts compare Michigan's local government workforce with the local government workforce across the entire country. The chart on the left looks at full-time employee pay. As the MPPS data told us in Michigan, we've seen a steady but small increase in the average local government employee pay since 2007. However, at the national level, full-time employee pay has increased more rapidly. So whereas in 2007, Michigan local government employees were making about $230 a month less than the national average. In 2016, that difference has become more than $600 per month less for Michigan workers. Then on the right-hand side, you can see the change in local government full-time employment workforce size in general from 2007 to 2016. The Michigan columns are measured in thousands of workers with the census reporting that the Michigan local unit statewide had 125,000 FTE employees in 2007. But that dropped during the Great Recession and it saw only a little growth between 2013 and 2016, standing at about 117,000 in 2016. By contrast, the local government workforce in the nation as a whole has recently bounced back with a similar drop after the Great Recession, but a return to pre-recession numbers in 2016 at over 5 million local government employees nationwide. This represents a decrease in local government workforce size in Michigan of about 7%, compared with 3% nationwide. The data from the MPPS shows that same trend as the census data. When it comes to the size of Michigan's local government workforce, during the Great Recession many officials tried to avoid outright firings and layoffs, but reductions were still fairly common. Again, our chart legend tells you that this lighter blue color indicates places that somewhat increased their number of employees over time, while the green indicates those who have decreased their overall number of employees from year to year, either somewhat or greatly. As Michigan's economy recovered over the past few years, the percentage of local jurisdictions reporting continuing staff cuts year over year has decreased steadily from 24% in 2011 to 5% in 2017. Meanwhile, the percentage of the report somewhat increasing their workforce compared to the previous year has grown from 2% in 2011 to 13% in 2017. Note that the vast majority are holding steady, those column sections in gray, and no one is reporting increasing their workforce size greatly. Let's compare jurisdictions of different sizes again. That previous slide showed us the year over year trend in changes. Now in this slide, we can see net change overall. The survey question was, how does the overall size of your jurisdictions workforce today compare to its size before the Great Recession? That left-hand column displays the assessment statewide of the change in workforce size since the Great Recession. In 2017, officials from 27% of jurisdictions across Michigan report a net decline in the size of their workforce, those shades of green, from before the Great Recession to now. Meanwhile, just 8% report an increase that blue, which indicates workforce is somewhat larger. In most local jurisdictions, 59%, officials reported there had been no significant change, although there are important differences by jurisdiction size. Among the state's largest local jurisdictions, look over there at that column on the far right. A full 70% report that their workforce is smaller now than before the Great Recession. Additionally, 56% of jurisdictions with a population of 10,000 to 30,000 people report that their workforce is smaller today, and 24% of those say significantly smaller. By contrast, only 14% of Michigan's smallest jurisdictions, those with fewer than 1,500 residents, say their workforce is smaller today. But of course, they started out with a smaller workforce to begin with. Now, whether or not a jurisdiction's workforce is now larger or smaller, one thing we really care about is whether it gets the job done. The Spring 2017 MPPS asked local leaders whether or not the current size of their workforce is adequate to provide the desired level of services. Since many local jurisdictions don't provide certain kinds of services, only some service areas were applicable to any particular jurisdiction. But we accumulated them all together by who offers what service, and in each of the four service areas we asked about, most local officials say their workforce size is adequate today. For example, 85% say that their workforce is adequate for the administrative management services required to run the local government. In addition, 79% of jurisdictions with employees providing fire services say their workforce size is adequate for fire protection. Somewhat fewer local leaders say their workforce size is adequate to provide police services, about 69%, and other public works and services, 69%. The unfortunate news is that over a quarter of local leaders statewide in units that provide police or public works say they have inadequate workforce size. So although most local leaders say they have adequate workforce in each service area, these reports of inadequacies in public safety services are somewhat concerning, giving the nature of those services. The chart on your left illustrates that among jurisdictions providing fire services, 21% of cities and 19% of townships say their workforce size is inadequate for their fire service needs. And in the right chart, you can see that inadequate police workforce size is reported by a whopping 47% of counties, 31% of cities and villages, and 22% of townships. Since almost half of all Michigan cities, townships and villages, report that they do not provide or contract for police services themselves, but simply rely on the county sheriff or the state police to respond when called, that county level concern may have implications for levels of policing communities throughout the state. And when we combine the four service areas we looked at, local officials from 35% of all Michigan local units say their workforce size is inadequate to provide a desired level of service for at least one service area. Okay, now let me turn the mic over to my colleague, Natalie Fitzpatrick. She's going to review a bit more of our findings, focusing on what local officials tell us about specific personnel problems they're facing. Give us just a second to switch the headphones. Thank you, Deborah. Beyond the issues of pay, benefits and workforce size, we also asked local officials about specific types of personnel problems that their jurisdictions face with their workforce. Let's start by looking at the issue of employee recruitment. Recruitment of employees with the necessary skills is by far the most common personnel problem that our respondents reported for their local government. Looking at this chart, green shades represent jurisdictions that say that recruitment is a problem, while blue shades represent jurisdictions that say that recruitment is not a problem. As shown on the left, almost half, 48% of local governments with employees say that recruiting employees with the needed skills is a problem for their workforce. On the right, you can see this is an even more common problem for cities and counties where more than two thirds of officials said this was a problem for their jurisdiction. It was also common in villages where 60% said it was a problem. In contrast, township officials were much less likely to say recruitment was a problem, as shown in the farthest right column. This may be due to the fact that many townships in our sample are smaller and may have a smaller workforce to start with and don't hire very often. Now, let's look at employee recruitment by jurisdiction size. You can see this is a very common problem for Michigan's largest jurisdictions, those with more than 30,000 residents. Almost three quarters of those jurisdictions say that recruitment is a problem. However, as this shows, recruiting employees is a problem for jurisdictions of all sizes, including almost half of the smallest jurisdictions. Another personnel issue we ask about is employee retention. While recruitment is a widespread problem in Michigan, retention is a much less common problem for Michigan's local governments, as you can tell by how much more blue there is on this slide. On the left, you can see that a much smaller percentage of jurisdictions statewide say retaining current employees is a problem than said recruitment is a problem. Just 17% say the retention is a problem. However, looking by jurisdiction size, as you can see on the right, it is more than twice as common a problem for the largest jurisdictions as it is statewide. Now let's look at what officials tell us about the causes of local government's problems with recruiting employees with the necessary skills and or retaining current employees. We asked officials about what factors contribute to their jurisdictions problems recruiting and or retaining employees and gave a list of four possible factors. Officials could select more than one contributing factor. As you can see, the most commonly cited factor was a shortage of qualified candidates. 70% of local leaders said this contributed to their problems recruiting or retaining employees. Additionally, almost half 46% believe they don't offer competitive compensation packages. This of course could be partly to blame for a lack of qualified candidates applying for the positions. Fewer local officials attribute their problems to losing current employees to other employers just under one quarter say that and just 8% believe their workforce atmosphere causes problems with recruitment or retention. Of course, recruitment and retention aren't the only workforce problems facing local governments across Michigan. While recruitment was the most common problem indicated by a respondents local governments across Michigan and in particular the largest jurisdictions face additional problems with their workforce. This chart shows both the overall frequency of workforce problems statewide, the left column in each of the four sections and their frequency among Michigan's largest jurisdictions, the right column in each of the four sections. You can see the difference by looking at the amount of green for each of the four sections of the chart, which shows the percentage of officials who say that each issue is a problem for their jurisdiction. The four issues shown here are adequate skill sets among current employees, employee morale, turnover due to retirements and transfer of knowledge from departing employees. In each of these areas, a much higher percentage of the largest jurisdictions say that issue is a problem compared to the statewide percentage. Looking at the farthest right pair of columns, you can see that transfer of knowledge from departing employees is a more common problem than the other three shown here for jurisdictions of all sizes. It's the second most common problem facing jurisdictions statewide after employee recruitment about one third of officials from all jurisdictions with employees statewide report that this is a problem, and this rises to more than half among officials from the largest jurisdictions. Next, we'll look at how some of jurisdictions are addressing this problem. One way jurisdictions can address problems with transfer of knowledge from departing employees is through a formal succession planning process. Local governments may develop such a plan to address problems due to current employee turnover or in anticipation of an upcoming wave of retirements. We asked local officials about the status of formal succession planning in their jurisdiction, whether they had a plan, were developing a plan, expected to develop a plan in the next five years, or did not expect to develop a formal plan in that time period. The dark blue on this chart shows that jurisdictions have already enacted a formal succession planning process, and the light blue shows jurisdictions that are currently developing a formal process. As you can see, this is a fairly small percent of Michigan's local governments. About a quarter of local governments shown in gray say they are likely to develop such a process in the next five years. However, the green section shows that more than one third of local governments are unlikely to develop a succession planning process. Among cities, formal succession planning is much more common than it is for other jurisdiction types. Cities are shown in the fourth column on this chart, and you can see that they are much more likely to already have such a process and also much more likely to be currently developing a formal succession planning process. Only 20% of city officials say their jurisdiction is unlikely to develop a formal succession plan in the next five years, compared to 38% overall. Now, let's look at why some jurisdictions are not doing any formal succession planning. We asked officials about the reasons why their jurisdiction is unlikely to develop a formal succession planning process and gave a list of five possible reasons. Officials could select more than one reason. The most commonly selected reason was simply that the jurisdiction did not need a formal plan at this time, followed by a sense that developing such a plan was not a priority for the jurisdiction's leadership. Fewer officials said that their local government lacked necessary resources, including staff time, financial resources, and internal expertise about succession planning. So, in case Deborah or I were talking too fast or you were checking your phone at a particular moment, let me just give you some of the highlights of our findings. More than half of jurisdictions with employees report increasing pay rates in 2017 and a similar percent predict increasing pay rates in the next year. However, these increases are reported to be modest. A quarter of local officials say pay rates in their jurisdiction are too low. Cost shifting of employee healthcare benefits has slowed since 2014. Most officials say their current workforce is large enough to deliver services, but about one-third say the recruitment size is inadequate for at least one service area. Recruitment of qualified employees is a problem for almost half of local jurisdictions. Officials say that a shortage of qualified candidates and a lack of competitive compensation contribute. So, I'll turn it back over to Deborah and our colleague Tom Ivaco, who will answer all the great questions you've been submitting. Hello, everybody. This is Tom Ivaco. I'm associate director of close-up and oversee the MPPS program. Deborah and I are going to try to address the questions that have come in. We have just a few. If you have any more questions to ask again, you can do that off to the right of the blue jeans window with that little icon with a person and a little chat bubble. Put your mouse over it. It should say moderator chat and you can just type a question in there. The first question that we have is a little bit complicated. This may take just a second to respond to. The question is just how strong is the connection between pay rates being too low and jurisdictions having problems recruiting qualified employees? So, it's hard for us to answer for sure. I think what we'd say is there appears to be a fairly strong connection between low pay and recruiting challenges, but it's most likely not the only thing going on. We did find that jurisdictions that say pay is too low for new hires are more likely to report problems recruiting compared to jurisdictions that say their pay rates are okay. I think it was something in a range of 70% of jurisdictions that say pay is too low have trouble recruiting and somewhere in the 40% who say pay is about right. So that's a pretty big difference. Still, the 40% of jurisdictions that say their pay is okay and yet they still struggle to recruit employees, I think, tells us that the challenge isn't just about pay. And in fact, this is one of the stranger things I think we found in the MPPS. This is in the report. We found that jurisdictions who said their pay rates are actually too high are slightly more likely than those who say pay rates are about right to have problems recruiting. That doesn't make a whole lot of intuitive sense. And so we're not really sure what's going on there. And so all of this I think makes us wonder what else could be going on and presumably there are a few things. Most likely these challenges are not unique to Michigan. We know for instance we've seen reports from across the country about challenges recruiting and retaining police officers in particular. And in other reports we've seen that's related to a number of reasons, things like low pay, but also not enough candidates for a variety of reasons, whether it's disqualifying behavior, drug use by candidates or lack of physical fitness and so on. And in addition, I think these problems are not just in the public sector. We saw recently that about 150,000 job openings are available in Michigan currently across the public and private sector. And it sounds like in many cases, there are just not enough qualified candidates out there. So overall, we do see a correlation between pay rates being too low and jurisdictions struggling to hire employees but there probably are numerous issues going on beyond just the pay rates. Should I take the next one? Yeah, that would be great. This is Deborah again. So someone asked, do you see any regional differences in your data? Seems like we have a different set of conditions up here in the UP with recruitment and brain drain and such. So we do see a few difference regionally. We do break down the data regionally as well and some of those differences are from the UP and some are found in other places. So when it comes to assessments of whether benefits are too high or too low or pay, officials from both the UP and Southeast Michigan are more likely than other regions to say their pay rates for new hires are too low. But on the other hand that fringe benefits for current employees are too high. So there's some regional differences we've seen there. I don't think there's actually much difference for the UP when it comes to local officials reporting problems with recruitment or retention. That's actually a pretty statewide phenomenon except in the Southeast, which tends to be hires on those issues. But I think it's because they contain more of our larger jurisdictions, which we mentioned in the presentation had particular problems with recruitment and retention. So I think it's more of a size issue than it is a region issue from what we've seen from what officials have reported to us. Officials in the UP do tend to be a little more likely to worry the public has a somewhat or negative view of their workers. But again, it's pretty muted. So I don't think it's necessarily as important. That's why we didn't in the report show as many regional differences because they weren't there as much as you might suspect they would be at least according to the officials in the survey. Yeah, actually, we have a couple questions here. I'll try to get to quickly. The first question is, was there any discussion of OPEB retiree health care funding in relation to the new legislation and the impact on recruiting of employees? Quick answer is no. The survey did not cover the new legislation and its impact on OPEB. We did see, although, you know, as I think it was Natalie had pointed out that we see some evidence of compensation pay and benefits being a challenge in recruiting employees. And so I think we would expect that health care changes, shifting of health care costs to employees in order to, you know, try to deal with OPEB debt may be a negative factor in trying to recruit employees. Another question. Let's see. The question is, I think one of your slides said police services in particular is an area of concern about not having enough employees, the workforce being inadequate to deliver police services. The question is how big of a problem is that really? I think we're not really sure. I've got senses that it's not a crisis that we're dealing with. One reason that we can't be more sure is unfortunately, this question on the survey, we didn't ask about levels of adequacy, which we often do on MPPS surveys will ask questions about variety of change, whether it's a significant change or somewhat of a change. On this question, we did not ask about levels of adequacy. We just asked is the workforce adequate to provide police services or is it inadequate? So this is a bit of a blunt force question. One reason I'd say I think we're probably not in a crisis situation on police services is that back a couple years ago, I think it was the fall 2015 MPPS survey. We had a lot of content on public safety services, including police services. And I don't have the specific percentages here, but we found pretty high levels of satisfaction among local leaders with the police services in their communities. In terms of overall satisfaction, but also there were some pockets of concern. I think we saw something like a quarter 25% of jurisdictions said that crime is a problem in their jurisdictions. And I think it was roughly about the same percentage said they felt like they didn't have enough funding to deliver police services. But overall, most jurisdictions were pretty satisfied with public safety in their communities. And so, even though we see here some level of concern that their workforce is inadequate, our gut sense is it's not a crisis situation in most places. Cool. So I knew we would get a question like this. What should local governments do if we're having problems finding good workers. So, well, we are not HR pros. So the first thing I'd suggest to do is talk with HR pros and others in that field. Beyond that, since increasing pay and benefits probably are not real options at this point, unless you're already doing that. I think I'd be looking for some solutions like maybe bringing in interns to build connections with young people, looking at things like flexible scheduling if possible or job sharing. So you can broaden that pool of people who might be interested in a job, maybe looking for ways to develop a work atmosphere that will be appealing. We saw that work morale was an issue in some locations in the survey. Providing training and career growth opportunities, you know, empowerment and other morale issues I think are often important for new hires nowadays. And then maybe evaluating if you can restructure certain operations to be more efficient. Of course, we did a whole series of surveys about intergovernmental cooperation and service sharing with neighboring jurisdictions. So we can go back and look at that data, but obviously a lot of places are either through EVIP have been incentivized to do more intergovernmental cooperation or you're just doing it on your own because it means it makes sense in terms of trying to find more workforce size and economy of scale for joint service delivery. But again, those are just some brainstorming ideas. I would definitely talk with the HR pros as a first step about recruitment issues if that's one of the problems that you're struggling with. Another question, was there any weight given to quote unquote a sense of place ideals for regions I think this is asking whether places that are doing place making maybe having more luck in recruiting employees and so on. That's a great question we did not ask that in this particular survey, but we have covered place making a couple of different times on MPPS surveys, including in some depth. And so, although we scramble here to kind of keep new reports coming out. This is the type of thing that we can go back. We have we have all these data from previous surveys and we could go back and kind of merge that data in from the previous survey and see if places that are doing place making may have fewer challenges recruiting employees. That's an interesting question. Yeah, I think we should definitely try to do that. That's really good. All right, how are we doing for time let's let's do one of the things that they came up somebody said did you showed some data that wasn't in the report why don't you put everything in your reports. And as Tom said, sometimes we can't finish the report because we have collected so much information, not just over the years but in each individual wave we're very fortunate, lots of of our local official respondents are willing to spend a lot of time on these surveys and answer all our questions. So in the reporting we try to strike that balance between covering all the important points without being so long that no one will read it. However, one way people can see the responses to every single question we ask is to go on our website. So let me see if we can switch over quickly and show you what we've got there to can you show it on your screen Tom or do I have to quit. If you can't I can try to do it. Yes, no, maybe, maybe not. Okay. Yes, I think I think we do see hopefully you folks out there can see our website this is the homepage of the close up website. And off on the left is the main navigation menu. We have a section for the Michigan public policy survey. As Debra had said at the beginning of this we post just about everything related to the survey program out of the website, all the questionnaires experts that we talked to to get advice on questions to ask. All of the questions that we have asked including results which we do hear through pre run data tables. And so if you click on that section. There's a table here that has data for each individual survey, and you can see the spring 2017 survey if you go to the data tables there. This is a list of all of the questions and quick responses broken down in a number of ways. So, the first question about whether jurisdiction has any employees at all. If you click on that. You see it's broken down by jurisdiction type. This is the present that say they have no paid employees. So no county said that 10% of townships 1% of cities 4% of villages, a total of 8% overall. We also break the data down by population size of communities, as you saw in many of the charts throughout this presentation, and we break the data down by the region within Michigan. So, all of the data whether or not we can get it into an individual report is available on our website. And I think we would just before we wrap this up, we would say if you have any questions about about anything that we presented here or other aspects of the survey. We're happy to take any questions that you have. You can call us here at the office or send questions in by by email to close up at umich.edu. Also, yeah, also a recording of this webinar will be posted online soon on that website. So in case you'd like to share a link to it with neighbors or friends or strange people walking down the street you're welcome to do that that link will be up online. And then finally here at close up we often go around the state making presentations on our survey findings and we'd be happy to give a customized presentation in your community so find a way in which the data works best for you, keeping in mind that we protect the confidentiality of any individual or single jurisdiction in the survey, but we can target the data by all jurisdictions in a county or in a region or help you look at other peer communities, just let us know. Once again, thank you so much for joining us and have a great day.