Wilmington’s year-old worker residency rule continues to have fans, critics

 

 

 

By Bradley Vasoli

A year ago, Wilmington faced a choice: Continue to require non-union municipal workers living outside the city to move in within a year of getting hired or ditch the restriction.

The city chose the former, a controversial policy to the point where outgoing Mayor Mike Purzycki (D) feels it’s hampering recruitment for some roles and helping recruitment for others.

It was a debate that led Purzycki to compare the debate to “mob rule” after Wilmington City Council rejected his effort to remove the residency rule.

In July 2022, Governor John Carney (D) signed legislation letting the city write residency rules for its staffers. Mayor Purzycki decided, in response, that a previous worker-residency requirement was no longer in effect and would not be enforced. A veto-proof majority of the City Council reacted by passing an ordinance keeping the mandate in place.

While no one, save elected officials, must live in Wilmington at the time of appointment, the new law gives hiring preference to those who do. A non-union employee must stay in the city for at least five years.

The ordinance authorized the creation of a “residency assistance fund” to help new workers relocate with subsidies for security deposits, down payments, and other expenses. But city administrators have yet to establish the fund.

While Wilmington has 809 union-affiliated employees, 244 city workers in such departments as Audit, Finance, Human Resources, Licenses & Inspections, and the Treasurer’s Office do not belong to a labor organization. Purzycki believes recruitment for these agencies is suffering because Council reimposed the residency mandate.

“Many candidates for non-union positions continue to decline to come in for a job interview due to the requirement,” administration spokesman Paul Ford told Delaware Live via email. “Additionally, some candidates expressed concern about the lack of consistency regarding the applicability of the requirement for union vs. non-union employees.”

All the while, he noted, the number of applications for entry-level union jobs has grown. He also mentioned the number of applications for the latest Wilmington Police Academy increased by 19 over those submitted last year, a rise he attributed to the city ending the residency requirement for police and other union workers in the last few months. He said the city has 75 vacancies, encompassing union and non-union positions.

“The adverse effect of the residency requirement remains a barrier to attracting and retaining talent for non-union employees, which are typically those professional and technical positions requiring specialized education, skills or training,” he explained.

Council President Ernest “Trippi” Congo (D) defended the residency requirement and urged the establishment of the assistance fund. He said that while Wilmington struggles to fill vacancies, the city could do a better job advertising available positions, particularly via social media.

“I’ve felt that the talent pool is here,” he said. “I just think that we need to make sure that Wilmingtonians are taken care of first because they are the ones who are paying for the salaries for those jobs.”

Wilmington isn’t alone in forbidding many employees to live elsewhere. Philadelphia enacted an even stricter ordinance in 2020, requiring all new civil-service hires to have resided there for at least one year before their appointments. From 2008 up to that point, Philadelphia gave workers six months to find a place in the city limits.

As of 2020, according to a Pew Charitable Trusts analysis, Philadelphia stood alone among large cities in making such a retroactive demand of workers. Some jurisdictions, like New York, give employees several months to move in while others, like Chicago, mandate residency on the date someone is hired.

While many cities have residency requirements, some of the largest, including Los Angeles, Houston, San Antonio, and San Diego, do not. The mandates appear to be less popular in the South and West. Some mid-Atlantic cities have adopted more limited rules than Wilmington’s: Baltimore, for instance, insists on residency for relatively few positions while Washington, D.C., does so for high-level staffers.

Katie Martin, project director for Pew’s Philadelphia Research and Policy Initiative, said many municipal governments that enact personnel-residency rules hope to achieve a more diverse workforce that reflects a city’s demographics. Pew does not take a position on whether such requirements make sense, nor has it analyzed their outcomes. However, Martin noted that American cities, irrespective of residency policies, generally find recruitment difficult.

“Cities across the country right now, whether or not they have residency requirements, are struggling to hire,” she said. “There are significant vacancy issues across the country right now.”

Some experts see employee residency requirements as unwisely limiting a city government’s talent pool while yielding no clear benefits.

“Requiring city employees to live within the limits of the city that employs them is a rule that does not seem to have any meaningful effect on outcomes of import, namely the quality of the services those individuals are tasked with delivering,” the conservative think tank Manhattan Institute’s Rafael Mangual told Delaware Live. “The downside risk associated with such rules is that cities cut themselves off from the potential benefits that might flow from hiring talented workers who live in the surrounding suburbs, making the positions cities seek to fill less competitive.”

Mangual said that while relocation aid could make a marginal difference for some workers, many employees opt to live in surrounding suburbs for non-financial reasons, including proximity to family, living-space needs, and lifestyle choices.

New Castle County Republican Committee Chair Eric Braunstein, who lives in nearby Arden, also disapproves of Wilmington’s mandate.

“Wilmington needs the best employees it can get, and therefore I would hate to see a residency requirement become a limiting factor on the quality of our Wilmington personnel,” he said.

Fred Smoller, a political scientist at Chapman University in Irvine, CA, also voiced concern that such ordinances could hinder recruiting qualified workers. He said, however, that the policy could be a worthy idea for some cities.

“There are good arguments on either side,” he said. “Forcing people to live in a city, particularly if they can’t afford it, seems unfair and would also perhaps limit the talent pool that the city could reach out to; I mean, there may be many really qualified people, but because they don’t want to move and aren’t willing to commute, they would just pass on that job…. But I also understand that the city wants people from the city.”

He cited the example of Los Angeles, whose police department employs many officers from the city’s northwestern neighbor of Simi Valley. Outside hires, thus, don’t have as direct an interest in the well-being of Los Angeles as those who live in that city.

At a minimum, Smoller said, a city would have to implement the kind of assistance fund authorized by Wilmington’s 2023 ordinance. Nevertheless, he agreed with the Manhattan Institute’s Mangual that it wouldn’t address noneconomic factors that cause some to want to live outside the city.