A MOTION confirming the executive's appointment of Jay Osborne as the director of the King County department of human resources.
I just don't know. So if somebody could help us figure that out, be great. You think it's this afternoon? Okay. All right. Turning to item eight, item eight pertains to the confirmation of Jay Osborne as the first director of the King County Department of Human Services. Unless that was once a department in the past, I don't know. But we recently created the new Department of Human Services, and Jay Osborne has been serving as the director of the Division of Human Resources. What am I saying? Services are human resources. We are joined by Sahar Fonti, who will give us a story on this. And Jay is here. Thank you, Mr. Chair. So how about the council central staff? For the record, the materials for your staff report can be found on page 19. Proposed Motion 2018 0398 would confirm the executive's appointment of Jay Osborne to be the director of the King County Department of Human Resources. The King County Charter provides for the Council to confirm or reject appointments by the county executive. Mr. Osborne has worked for the county in a variety of roles since 1988. His resume can be found on page 29, and the answers to his question to the questions posed by the Council can be found on page 33, and he's served in a variety of roles since 1988, including as the director of the King County Human Resources Division. And he's helped establish the new Department of Human Resources, which the Council approved last week. He is in the audience for the council's questions should the motion move forward? There is an amendment on page 25 of your materials that would make a technical change, inserting the enacted ordinance number for the new Department of Human Resources. And that concludes my report. Thank you, Sahar. What was the last item about in. A packet. What materials are there? The amendment on page 25. Okay. What would that do? That just in inserts the enacted ordinance number for the new department, because you just end with that number beforehand. Right. All right, Jay, would you like to come forward case members have questions or comments. Thank you very much for being here. Thank you. Do members have a question or comment for Mr. Osborne? It seems like we should all kick us off. You've been the director of the division. How's it going? It's going pretty well. You know, it's interesting, after 30 years in the county to have an opportunity to do something from the seat of human resources and all of the work that the chief people officer, Ms.. Abrams and the exac have done the stand up investing in you and move the ball forward. Quite excited to work with the Office of Equity and Social Justice and all of the folks to make a difference in the lives of our 15,000 employees. So thank you. Councilmember Gossett. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I want to ask you the same question I asked when he was in my office. I think that that is helpful. Historically speaking, we've had human resources or personnel offices in each department, and we would call them and they would give us direct hands on information about openings or whatever it is we wanted to have. How is it going to be better having a centralized personnel and human resources department, in your opinion? Well, I think that part of the issue is that every department has a different funding structure, so some of them have more robust H.R. teams than others. Standing up a department and having the H.R. manager for each one of those departments report directly to me ensures we're having some consistency of practice, investigations, hiring sort of protocol, and then we're better able across the county to sort of lean and be more efficient in how we do the hiring and training of our workforce. Would you characterize that as the major reason for the consolidation into a single department? I think it's twofold. One is the ESG plan and sort of the work that we're getting ready to do throughout the county and institutionalizing some of that work. We're going to be coming back to you next year with updated code and personnel guidelines and really looking at our practices across the board for how we manage the workforce , consolidating some of those, making it cleaner and clearer for our employees and what their practices. For our listening audience. Can you tell us what ESG means and what you mean by updating it in a more comprehensive manner? I think so. It stands for equity and social justice, and it is the county's commitment to provide opportunities for all of our citizens in an equitable way. And there are a lot of practices that we're doing throughout the workforce for that. One of the budget proposals before you is also a central role in my office to work with the recruiters throughout the county to make sure that we're reaching out to the right communities and spending some time doing some quality recruitment for all of the positions. We hire about 1200 employees every year. So we do have a lot of movement within our ranks as well. And in terms of the racial makeup of our county work force, Howard won. Find out how the last couple of years we've been doing in each department or overall in terms of maintenance and have numbers of employees from various people of color communities. That is a benchmark we're tracking. Tracking it by department down to work group for the last few years. We can provide that information. You can provide that information to me. Yes, thank you. Thank you. Councilmember Garza, Councilmember Coles. Thank you, Mr. Chair. And congratulations on your appointment. J Thank you. I question I have is you really have a stellar long background experience in the county. I'm sure you know it inside and out, but your experience has mainly been in roads and parks, and now this is a new challenge, new policy area for you or not policy, but just new area for you. And I have no doubt you can do it and have been doing it well. But I was looking at your background and you have a B.A. in social work and in in psychology, two different ones, which may be really more suitable to this new endeavor that you're undertaking. And so I'd just like to hear a little bit more about what you are bringing to this role, what you'd like to accomplish, given that you don't have the specific background in human resources. I think for me, part of it is having been a long term county employee and understanding how things work within the county and how you can get something done, standing up a department, going from a division to a department, sort of the framework around that. We've done some things like looking at how we provide support to work groups in crisis and really emphasizing some of what we're able to provide in a more consistent way. I think what I bring personally in here is just the ability to create an organization that can be functional, remove some of the roadblocks, have some of the conversations that need to be had and be able to create a framework so that our employees in h.r. Are the best trained and most productive employees they can be. Thank you, Councilmember Balducci and then Lambert. Thank you, Mr. Chair. And Jay, congratulations. And thank you for being willing. This is one of the challenging roles in King County government. We we can't do much of what we do without our people. And so making sure we have the right people in the right place with the right training is critically important. One of the interesting things about King County is the way it's changed over the years. There was a centralized department, then it was expanded to put the h.r. Managers in the operating departments. And now we're talking about sort of tying them close more closely back to the central department. And I, i see the I see the evolution there. It's a service to the departments and making sure their needs are being met and we're being responsive in h.r. To the department. At the same time, you want to have standards and performance metrics that are consistent. How are you going to balance that? That tension of making sure that the departments are getting what they need. And let me just give you an example. Some of the departments are really struggling with hiring and how to fill all the vacancies that we have to do these critical jobs. How do how do we help departments to have a quick, efficient and yet effective hiring process address sets out and address the the things that are stopping us from being able to hire the people we need and and do all that with a more centralized focus. Just as an example, you can pick a different example if that one doesn't work for you. And that's a good one. There's quite a challenge that we're having in some circles too, and I think so. Every department has a senior manager who's been doing this for a long time. They've risen through the ranks. They've got great experience that is working as a kitchen cabinet to some degree with folks within H.R. to really look at the policies, the barriers, what we're doing. They've got some great ideas and tapping into this group in a dynamic way to start to address some of these things. There are different needs for recruitment. It's hard to find jail guards on a job as officers. Let me just stop you right there. Yes, correctional corrections officers. Thank you. Thank you. First day on the job. I know you're newbie. I got working on my dialog here, so. And finding appropriate ones for this market in the housing market, where we are, what that looks like and it's a stressful job and what can we do to sort of help the stressors that are around there to make sure that the workforce that's there can have productive careers as well as get more folks in to help deal with the timing issues. There's that's a really good example of an area we need to focus on and sort of look at practices nationwide as well as things that we could do to stand up. We have a lot of folks going out from some of the departments to recruiting events, having a more comprehensive recruiting process for all the places we have. Needs, I think will make a big difference as we stand up the department. Thank you. And anything that we can do to help with these challenges, it's they're really critical to the county providing services to the public. So we're here to try to help. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you. Councilmember actually, Councilmember Lambert. Yes. Yes. So and following up with the last question, the process is of hiring is so long and cumbersome that sometimes some of the best candidates drop out. So making sure that we can be nimble is going to be a really big deal. So thank you. What my question is, is and first of all, I'd like to thank you. I have already seen some of your good work in the fact that when we had an employee die in my office, not in my office, in the hospital, but an employee of my office, I guess a better one. Your counseling, your planning transition and your grief counseling for our team and the entire floor was very, very helpful. So thank you for all the good work that went into that. It was it was not easy. So thank you for helping you make it easier. My question is the session planning? Some people are getting older. I don't know why they do that, but some people are. So how are we going to deal with that? When you look at the average age of people in various departments, how are we going to maybe overlap? Because I my fear is that a lot of really amazing tricks than ideas. Then history is walking out the door and how do we make sure that there's some way of tapping into that other than telling them, you can't leave ever. There's a few that we should say that to. Yes, I know. I do think, you know, one of the things in the code that will be coming back to you in the personnel guidelines would be an inability to let us double slot people for a few months and have some transition time. We're also been looking at succession. Planning at the highest level. So Whitney Abrams and I have been meeting with the department directors and talking about their timelines and sort of in the appointed ranks. How are we doing all the way down through the agencies? We also have a changing workforce and we're tracking some of that. The way we do work is changing and evolving. So how many people you need in different areas varies and how do we still make a commitment to retool, retrain and help those people be successful in other areas as they go? We have one of the things that I'll say from Rhodes, we have some very senior people know every crack of every roadway and where to go, when and how that knowledge gets passed on to the betterment of the citizens is also a key part of what we look at as we pass down that knowledge. So I, I also when you think about roads, water inland, Tom being, I don't know, just historic roads or she retired, you know. I don't know. Okay. Well, anyway, Tom Beam knew every inch of every river in his entire county. And you could just say this one is kind of over here and has a band. Oh, that must be over here at milepost such and such. And, and, and I'm like, oh, my gosh. So when you have employees like that, it's really hard to lose them. So ah, and he may still be here. I think he retired, but I'm not sure. So I really like the idea, the overlap. And it's not possible to just hand the baton over to somebody and say, Here's my 30 years of experience, good luck without walking alongside that person. So thank you very much. All right. Thank you. Anything else? All right. Councilmember COLAs, would you be willing to put the motion before us? Yes. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I move. Propose motion number 2018 0398 confirming the executive's appointment of Jay Osborne as the director of the King County Department of Human Resources. That's before a seminal column. Councilmember Lambert. Thank you. Have had the opportunity to work with Mr. Osborne as he was in Rhodes. And I'd just like to say a couple of things. There are many things to respect about him. One is he's very levelheaded. He sees things in a very practical way. He can deal with controversial issues and be the person that just can handle all the different things and get people together. He's knowledgeable on so many different areas and if you look in this room to all his coworkers are here to support him. You don't see their pompoms, but you see their smiles. They are here because he was really good to work with. The only thing that I would complain about is he's not allowed us to clone him. I think we could use a lot more just like him. But until then, I'm really glad that we have him where he is. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you. Anything else? All right, we have an amendment. Councilman Coles, would you move the amendment? The amendment inserts the ordinance number that created the Department of Human Resources. It's Amendment One. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I move Amendment one. All in favor. Say I, I. And he opposed. All right, turn to the underlying ordinance as amended, and we'll call the roll. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Councilmember Belge, Councilmember Dunn. Councilmember Gossett, I. Councilmember Colwell, I. Councilmember Lambert, hi. Councilmember McDermott, Councilmember of the girl. Councilmember one right there. Mr. Chair. Hi, Mr. Chair. The vote is eight eyes, no no's, one excuse. Okay. We've given a unanimous do pass recommendation to you, J and four. This ordinance will expedite it, and I think we can place it on the consent agenda. Our council is telling me that that means it'll be on next Monday's agenda, which I guess makes some sense because. Congratulations and thank you. Thank you all for being here and for your work for King County. All right. That takes care of our action items today. We have two briefings, one on the solid waste comprehensive plan update the other on the 2016 to 22 Equity and Social Justice Strategic Plan.