Clean Water Advocacy - Newsroom - AMSA in the News
Age Drain
By Denise Jewell
Saturday, April 09, 2005
Forty percent of the Niagara Falls Water Board’s 137 employees will be
eligible to retire within five years. Here, Willie Carson cleans up a work site
on 79th street. (James Neiss)
The city’s water and sewer plants are facing a brain drain.
An assessment of the plants’ operations found that nearly 40 percent of workers
for the Niagara Falls Water Board will be eligible to retire within five years.
With those workers could go years of unwritten knowledge about the inner
workings of the city’s water and sewer plants.
The statistic has employees — from management to union rank-and-file — worried
about the future of water and sewer services in the Falls.
“If you have a mass exodus due to retirement and you don't have the skilled,
qualified people in here to train, then how do you run the facilities?” said
Thomas Vitello Sr., president of the United Steelworkers of America Local No.
9434-00.
As older workers have retired through the years, Vitello said, many have not
been replaced by younger workers. A staff that once included assistant operators
now includes only operators, and trainee positions intended to fill the pipeline
with novice workers have not been filled, Vitello said.
That trend will likely continue as the board implements a plan to trim about 40
positions at the city’s water and sewer plants as the workers retire.
Robert Game, the Water Board’s executive director, said managers are working to
prevent the loss of institutional knowledge as staff positions are cut.
“What we're ultimately trying to do is get all that stuff so that it's in maps,
so that's it's in geographical information systems, so that when somebody
leaves, we have the information available to tap,” Game said.
Knowledge drain
To combat the problem, the board has hired a consultant at $1 million price tag
to help change the way the plants are run and trim the workforce as employees
retire.
An assessment by the consultant, EMA Inc., last year found that the Water Board
had no succession plan in place to deal with retirement or turnover.
EMA is working with the utility’s staff to cross train workers so that knowledge
about the plants’ inner workings does not reside with just one person.
Game pointed to a chief operator at the waste water treatment plant who retired
last year after working for the public utility for several decades.
“He just gained tremendous amount of knowledge about the treatment plant and how
it operates,” Game said. “When he retired, it's a lot of that knowledge in his
head that walks out the door.”
The consulting plan — estimated to cost the Water Board an additional $1 million
before the process is complete — also calls for trimming about 40 workers from a
staff that last fall was about 137.
Game said the water and sewer plants saw an influx of workers in the 1970's when
the city's industrial base began to slip. In 1976, when a new waste water
treatment plant came online, more than 200 people took a civil service test for
a job that only a few years before had just handful of applicants, Game said.
Ten years later, more than 400 people took the same test for entry level
positions at the plants.
“Some of those people have even retired already,” Game said.
Doing more with less
Paula Dannenfeldt, executive director of the Association of Metropolitan
Sewerage Agencies, said the effects of an aging workforce aren’t just affecting
Niagara Falls.
While much of the country’s workforce will soon face a similar dilemma as baby
boomers retire, Dannenfeldt said public entities often have long-time workers
who spend their entire careers with one employer.
“I think in utilities, because it frequently is a governmental entity, you tend
to have a lot more people that come in and, because of the benefits and
retirement, stay for years and years,” Dannenfeldt said.
That could mean a glut of workers who leave at one time.
The association — with the help of EMA, the same utility consultant hired by the
Falls Water Board — issued a report last year to help public and private
utilities develop plans to address high turnover rates.
But Vitello contends managers at the Niagara Falls Water Board has aggravated
the problem by failing to bring in new trainees to learn from older workers.
Meanwhile, the remaining workers, he said, have been forced to do more with
less.
“They never fill the positions until it gets to the point ... where they've been
cut to the bare bones,” Vitello said.
Union leaders have raised concerns that the money allocated for the consulting
work could have been better spent on other expenses, like replacing aging
equipment.
The Water Board, which has faced a sharp decline in industrial customers as
expenses continue to rise, is hoping to control increasing water and sewer rates
by changing the way the plants operate and trimming the size of its workforce.
Since EMA Inc. was brought on last year, the plant has trimmed nearly a dozen
workers through attrition.
“The goal is to still operate the place effectively and efficiently, reduce the
staff over time, try to avoid layoffs,” Game said. “Try to be humane about it.”