The city has positions it can't seem to fill — a lot of them. The last estimate put the vacancy count at about 2,000.

Some of the money budgeted each year for hiring these people gets spent instead on paying overtime to current employees who pitch in, or to hire contractors — often retirees formerly on the city payroll. And then the excess goes into the city's "carryover" fund.

This should be a temporary workaround, but it's morphed into a haphazard method of budgeting. It moves the city no closer to a more sustainable way of getting the people's work done: filling the jobs on a permanent basis.

As things are, money budgeted for salaries of new hires is sometimes used instead for various expenses, including vacation payouts due to retirements or resignations, paid sabbaticals and other obligations. Unspent money rolls over into a general "carry-over" reserve, or rainy-day fund.

Finding the right candidate for some jobs is hard, but officials need to sort out which positions are likely to be filled as they are defined and which duties could be handled more efficiently by offering overtime to current employees or by issuing contracts.

City Council Chairwoman Barbara Marshall rightly argues that there's no reason to further fatten the general reserve and has proposed Bill 24 to tackle part of the problem. It would move unspent money on vacant positions to the same reserve fund set up primarily to cover health benefits for retired city workers.

It also would make the hiring money more available to fill positions citywide and would enable unspent money in this reserve to be spent on other city needs. The council must ensure, however, that such spending won't tap what's needed for benefits.

Further, the city must refine which jobs can be filled permanently and which might be stricken from the budget, with the savings passed on to taxpayers. The current system merely enables inefficiency and postpones solutions to a chronic hiring backlog.