Mayor Cherelle Parker names new directors to lead human resources and the city budget
Parker tapped two women already working in city government to fill the jobs at the top of the Parker administration.
Mayor Cherelle L. Parker appointed two officials to fill roles in the top of her administration Monday, tapping new leaders to oversee the city budget and human resources following a pair of departures.
Sabrina Maynard, who was previously the deputy director of finance, will be the administration’s new budget director, a role she filled briefly last year at the end of former Mayor Jim Kenney’s administration.
Maynard replaces budget director Robert McDermott, a former City Council staff member who oversaw this year’s budget process and left the administration for a position in the private sector.
Parker also announced Monday that Candi Jones, the first deputy director of the Office of Human Resources, will now serve as the city’s director of human resources. She replaces Michael Zaccagni, who is retiring after about 40 years in city government.
Zaccagni has overseen a tumultuous time in city government and has been largely tasked with addressing a yearslong short-staffing problem that has plagued the municipal workforce since the pandemic, when the city lost thousands of workers to retirement and resignations.
Jones will inherit that problem. About 18% of the city’s full-time positions were still unfilled as of Sept. 30, the most recent date for which figures are available.
She will also be a key player interfacing with the labor unions that represent city workers, and Parker said she played a key role in contract negotiations with AFSCME’s District Council 33, the city’s largest municipal workers union, which reached a deal with the administration to avert a strike last week.
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More than 11 months into Parker’s administration, other key roles still remain in flux. The Department of Public Health and the Department of Behavioral Health and Intellectual disAbility Services each have interim directors.
Parker said that she is “pretty close” to selecting leaders of those agencies but that she “won’t be rushed.”
“I just ask everyone to trust the process,” Parker said. “I have watched people rush to make a decision, and if you want to see a recipe for disaster, rush to select someone for a position of leadership for something as significant as those [roles], who doesn’t share in the vision that is before them.”
Last month, Parker announced several appointments filling top jobs in planning and development, where interim heads were in place for months.
Monday’s announcement also comes just six weeks after the unexpected departure of Aren Platt, one of Parker’s top aides who left his job as chief deputy mayor to lead the mayor’s political arm. Both Platt and Parker said his exit was amicable, but it was seen as a substantial shift in personnel at the top rung of the mayor’s administration, which is less than one year old.
Vanessa Garrett-Harley, a veteran of City Hall who has led human and family services agencies, replaced Platt as chief deputy mayor, joining the trio of advisers Parker refers to as “the Big Three.” The other two top staffers are Chief of Staff Tiffany W. Thurman and Chief Deputy Mayor Sinceré Harris.