When City Hall imposed the hiring freeze on departments about three years ago, the small departments such as ours felt the brunt of a system that attempts to manage through attrition. If you lose too many of the critical people, you're in trouble. For most of this period we had a vacancy factor of 25%.

Now that the freeze is over, the "thaw" is hitting us. The reason is that departments, especially the large departments, are able to fill most vacancies and thereby offer promotional opportunities to those who ranked high on the promotional lists but couldn't move up because of the freeze.

We currently have a vacancy factor of 20% and rising. Within the section that runs the Funding Program and manages our administrative matters, we've replaced or are in the process of replacing 11 of the 16 employees. You always hope that the outgoing employees thoughly brief their replacements, but sometimes they never meet because of the time it often takes to find the new employee. We appreciate your patience and understanding.