MoDOT director credits worker retention to pay raises

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. – After struggling for years to find workers, the Missouri Department of Transportation continues to gain staff.

At one point, the state’s transportation department was short a thousand employees, but now there’s only 200 vacancies. Missouri Department of Transportation (MoDOT) Director Patrick McKenna said another pay raise from the General Assembly is a big part of the solution.

“We’ve stabilized,” McKenna said in an interview. “I think that we hit our floor and we’ve been building up from that.”

It’s been a challenge for MoDOT, retaining employees or hiring workers to make up for staff retiring. McKenna said at the beginning of 2024, the department was short more than 500 workers and faced a 20% turnover rate.

“We’ve hired in the last 14 months, we’ve hired about 1,150 people,” McKenna said. “That means about 800 have left, but we’re netting a positive gain and that’s where we really need to build the next generation of transportation workers. Our team, even in this labor market, we’ve been making progress and we still have a lot of people retiring but we’ve been able to replace them.”

Even with an increase in employees, MoDOT still faces a shortage of about 2 million labor hours.

“That’s where if you don’t think we’re doing as good of a job as you would like to see mowing or animal pickup or sign replace or other things that are critical,” McKenna said.

Last year, state workers received an 8.7% pay raise from lawmakers. This year, the General Assembly approved another 3.2% cost of living increase. Besides the 3.2% raise, there’s also money in the budget for an additional 1% boost for every two years worked, capped at 10%.

Overall, Parson’s administration has approved a 20% boost in pay since 2018.

“We were way off market and MoDOT, the commission, converted us to a market-based compensation plan,” McKenna said.

With the heat in full force this week, it’s hard to think about seasonal workers for the upcoming winter months, but that still remains a concern for MoDOT.

“As it stands now, we bring our young engineers in and they are mandated to get their CDL [commercial driver’s license] and help us plow,” McKenna said. “That can hurt us on our recruiting of engineers because some people just aren’t comfortable with that.”

McKenna said each part of the state faces its own problem. In Kansas City, he said there’s a lack of maintenance workers, while across the state in St. Louis, construction inspectors are hard to come by.

Despite the shortage of workers over the past few years, McKenna said he’s impressed with the MoDOT team to still complete hundreds of construction projects.

“You consider our construction program has gone up by a factor of five and we haven’t added staff during that time,” McKenna said. “We’ve supplemented a lot with consulting work for design, whereas our maintenance operations, we’ve seen the big decline in labor hours.”

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