Roanoke Rapids Human Resources Director Christina Caudle gave the council some upbeat news about the city’s turnover rate on Tuesday.

She said that in the first six months of the year, the city’s turnover rate is now at 5.26 percent. “We are doing a really, really great job there,” she said. “That’s not a human resources thing, that’s an everybody thing with recruitment and retention of our employees.”

Addressing the council, she said, “That includes what you guys do with budgeting, looking at COLAs — cost of living adjustments — and the MAPS Group — things like that have all really turned out to be where we are retaining quality employees, which is great. Hopefully, we will stay that way.”

Caudle has been tracking the turnover rate since taking the HR role in 2023. She said the National League of Cities recommends that local governments try to stay under a 10 percent turnover rate so that there is some natural attrition while retaining knowledge and experience.

In mid-2023, the turnover rate was 44 percent, which, she said, “Hurts my heart to even say that out loud.”

In fiscal year 2024, the city reduced the rate to about 18 percent, and last year the average dropped to 9.42 percent, which put the city just under the NLC threshold of 10 percent.

As far as demographics, Caudle said that for full-time employees, staff is about 75 percent male and 25 percent female. “We’re also at about 70 percent White and 30 percent non-White, and 29 percent of that is African American.”

The average employee age is 41, while the average years of service is just under 10, which she described as “a really good statement of the experience within our organization. All in all, based on when I first started tracking us a couple of years ago to today, we’ve made some really good improvements and we’re doing really well within our organization as a whole.”

Caudle said much of the improvement is related to the police department. “They have done a tremendous job recruiting and retaining individuals over the last six months of the year.”

She said the RRPD will have a few new hires starting within the next month. “They’re doing a really good job with recruitment, and that is helping that number.”

Chief Lawrence Wiggins said the police department has reduced its vacancies down to four. “We have one in the hiring process, and then we have three additional vacancies. We are still accepting applications for certified police officers. We really have a great place to work.”