Q: How many full-time positions have been added to the municipal workforce in Mankato in recent decades?
A: That’s a paraphrase of the final of a series of questions asked by a reader in last week’s Ask Us column about city plans to create a new Parks and Rec Department. The reader went on to list more than a dozen municipal departments and functions and asked for an accounting of the change in the number of employees in each category compared to 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago and 40 years ago.
The workforce growth thing was so sufficiently complex and space-consuming that it got pushed off to this week’s column.
Ask Us Guy, recognizing that city officials have other duties beyond historic research for The Free Press, attempted to give the illusion of reasonableness when seeking answers to the questions. Instead of digging up staffing levels for four previous decades, he asked for stats on the current municipal workforce and — for comparison — numbers on one or two other years requested by the reader.
Susan Arntz, who was hired as city manager in fall of 2020, responded after assigning staff to dig into the data and taking some time to get up to speed on how her predecessor counted positions.
“We do not maintain detailed records of past staffing levels in a format that allows for easy retrieval,” Arntz said in her written response. “As a result, it took some time to compile the data. We were able to gather data from 2017 to current. We don’t have the level of detail requested for earlier years.”
Before moving on to the numbers, there are a few caveats. The stats are for budgeted positions rather than filled positions. Also, the department or division that a particular employee is assigned to has shifted at times to better reflect when someone is doing work for two or more departments.
All that being said, the bottom line is the city of Mankato has fewer part-time employees now than eight years ago and more full-time workers.
But the growth in the municipal workforce hasn’t been particularly dramatic for a growing city. Mankato’s population from 2017 to 2023 — the last year projections are available — grew at about 1.4% a year. So that pace over an eight-year period would be a bit more than 11%.
The number of full-time city employees grew 12.6% during that time period, from 256.7 to 289 — an increase that pretty much exactly matches the growth in bus drivers, police officers, firefighters and civic center employees.
At the same time, the number of budgeted part-time workers fell. A lot of that was in the police department, where the city discontinued the use of part-time officers.
“We eliminated the part-time police staffing due to changes in the licensure requirements for part-time police officers,” Arntz said.
The 2017 budget included nearly 30 part-time positions in the Department of Public Safety, compared to fewer than seven in 2025. But it would be misleading, it seems, to suggest that part-timers were carrying a lot of the workload in the department eight years ago.
While 30 part-time positions were listed in the 2017 budget, the entire budget for part-time cops in 2017 was $57,200, which would equate to about half of the cost of salary, benefits and equipment for a single rookie full-time officer.
Overall, Public Safety now has 90 full-time employees (up from 85), including 44 full-time officers (up from 35). Full-time firefighters increased from 12 to 15.
Other big changes were in the city’s transit department, which has grown substantially in recent years with many more bus routes and expanded hours of operation. From 2023 to 2024 alone, ridership grew from 383,360 to 461,451. In 2017, there were about 15 part-time transit employees and 12 full-timers. This year, it’s nearly 26 full-timers and 13 part-timers.
The civic center is the third area of noticeable growth in full-time employees, but that’s primarily because much of the work was once done through a contract with an independent management firm operated by Burt Lyman. Then-City Manager Pat Hentges ended that practice in 2018, bringing the duties in-house. That expanded the number of full-time city employees working at the civic center from eight in 2017 to 14 today.
Most other departments changed very little, up or down just a position or two. Among those with at least 10 employees, Public Works and Engineering dropped from 42 to 39 total employees with the number of full-timers unchanged with just over 34.
The number of wastewater workers declined from 20 to 19, virtually all of them full-time workers. The water plant dropped from 20 to 17.
Finally, there’s a section of the workforce involved in Internal Services. They’re essentially workers that provide services to all of the other departments, including management of facilities, administrative oversight, human resources, budgeting and even the Central Garage, where mechanics do repairs and maintenance for vehicles ranging from squad cars to buses to snowplows.
Including interns, part-timers and the seven-member City Council, the size of the Internal Services workforce at City Hall and in the Central Garage has grown from just over 57 employees to just over 60 since 2017.
Contact Ask Us at The Free Press, 418 S. Second St., Mankato, MN 56001. Call Mark Fischenich at 344-6321 or email your question to mfischenich@mankatofreepress.com; put Ask Us in the subject line.
