Slowly but surely, city government is making progress on its thousands of vacancies — positive steps in the right direction, but frustrating since it can’t happen fast enough to fill the backlog of critically important jobs, such as in the Honolulu Police Department. The 385 HPD vacancies are particularly vexing, as they persist despite increased HPD recruiting and marketing, amid resignations and retirements.

To be sure, many openings are hard to fill — such as for inherently dangerous police jobs and other slots requiring specialized skills — but many others remain stymied by sluggish bureaucracy. Current efforts to compress times on three major steps along the hiring process are cheered — but serious discussions also should begin between the city and public worker unions to review long-standing job descriptions, and to evolve empty positions as needed to ensure optimal efficiencies for modern times.

Last year, with more than 3,000 city vacancies, Mayor Rick Blangiardi tapped the Bloomberg-Harvard Cities Leadership Initiative to assess why it took an average half-year to fill an average city job — and sought solutions to flatten the timeline. The long-overdue review found a convoluted, “labyrinth” hiring system layered with redundancies, inefficiencies, uneven departmental handling and pervasive lack of urgency. In August, Blangiardi gave his administration three months to cut the hiring time in half.

By April 30, the positive news is that overall, job openings have dropped to around 2,500-plus, a 23% vacancy rate for the city’s roughly 11,000-person workforce. On the three major steps of hiring, times have shortened on:

>> Step 1, approval to fill a position, which had averaged 62 days, being cut by half.

>> Step 2, screening of eligible candidates and recruiting workers, which had averaged 49 days, also has been halved.

>> But step 3, interviewing and selection, which took about 70 days, has been cut by only 25%.

All in all, that still averages to more than 3.5 months to fill a position — better, but with room for more improvement.

As for the labor unions being part of the solution: Randy Perreira — head of the Hawaii Government Employees Association that represents some 3,300 city employees averaging about $60,000 yearly — lamented problems linked to chronic understaffing, of overwork of existing workers. He’s also criticized the exorbitant proposed pay raises for the city’s top officials and politicians, some up to 64%. He’s right on that score: City Council members should reject those hefty raises — and instead, take the opportunity to call for the administration and unions to do a clear-eyed assessment of the city’s job vacancies. Evolving jobs to align with the city’s actual needs might well reduce the number of vacancies — and leave more money available for those working who deserve it.