Onondaga County has 635 fewer filled jobs than in 2011. Its old nursing home explains 489 of them

Onondaga County government filled 3,113 positions across all of its funds on August 14, 2026. That is 635 fewer than the 3,748 it filled on January 6, 2011, a drop of 16.9 percent, according to the “Status of Countywide Filled Positions” table in the county’s 2027 Executive Budget.

Most of that drop did not happen inside departments that still exist. Van Duyn Home and Hospital, the county nursing home, carried 489 filled positions in January 2011 and was transferred to Upstate Services Group on November 30, 2013, the budget says. The Metropolitan Water Board carried 31 and was consolidated with the Onondaga County Water Authority on January 1, 2017.

Take those 520 positions out and the rest of Onondaga County government is down 115 filled positions in 15 years, or 3.6 percent. The count has also risen three Augusts in a row, from 2,996 in 2023 to 3,030 in 2024, 3,087 in 2025 and 3,113 in 2026, a gain of 117.

Why it matters: this is the one page in the county budget that shows how many Onondaga County government jobs are actually filled, department by department, and the raw 15-year drop is easy to misread without knowing which departments moved, merged or left.

What does the filled positions table count?

Positions with a person in them on one day each year, not positions the budget pays for. Each department’s budget pages carry a separate roster of authorized positions and a 2027 staffing count by program, and the two can sit well apart.

The document does not say how much of each gap is vacancy and how much is new for 2027, and program staffing can include grant-funded positions while the filled table’s first page covers the General Fund only.

Timing matters too. The 2011 column is dated January 6, 2011, while every later column is mid-August (August 18, 2023, August 16, 2024, August 15, 2025 and August 14, 2026), and the table does not say whether seasonal or part-time positions are included. The 15-year comparison is not like for like on timing; the year-to-year comparisons from 2023 on are.

What happened to the county Corrections Department?

Corrections shows 176 filled positions on January 6, 2011, then a dash in every later column. The dash is not 176 jobs disappearing. It marks a department that no longer exists as a separate budget unit.

The county’s 2018 Adopted Budget explains it. At a special session on August 31, 2017, the County Legislature adopted a local law “transferring supervision and control of the Department of Correction to the Sheriff’s Office,” subject to a referendum at the November 2017 general election. That budget moved the correctional facility from Administrative Unit 15, the Department of Correction, to Administrative Unit 79, the Sheriff’s Office, and the department’s own roster shows 206 authorized positions in 2017 and zero for 2018.

Later budgets confirm it. The 2021 Adopted Budget prints the same table with a zero for Correction on January 10, 2018 and every date after. The 2027 Executive Budget organizes the Sheriff’s Office as four departments, Civil, Custody, Police and Correction, and the Correction Department’s four programs carry 97 staff. The Sheriff’s Office website says the department operates the Jamesville Correctional Facility.

So the like-for-like comparison is the two rows together: 728 filled positions in January 2011 (552 Sheriff plus 176 Corrections) against 581 in the Sheriff’s Office in August 2026, which now includes Correction. That is 147 fewer, or 20.2 percent, across police, custody, civil and correction work combined. The table does not split the 2026 figure by department.

CNY Signal re-added every column, and the printed totals match only if each dash counts as zero; the 2021 edition prints the same cells as 0. Read a dash as no filled positions recorded on that line that day, not as the work stopping.

The line is still in motion. On February 7, 2023, the Legislature passed Local Law No. 1 of 2023, which struck the word “Corrections” from the Administrative Code and cited “the resultant need for closure of the county penitentiary facility,” and it ordered a plan to consolidate Jamesville Correctional Facility and the Onondaga County Justice Center by April 1, 2023, a date the County Executive could extend. The 2027 Executive Budget still funds the Correction Department’s 97 staff.

Which Onondaga County departments grew and which shrank?

The full table as printed on pages 2-41 and 2-42 of the Fiscal Summary. A hyphen reproduces the county’s dash. The last column is CNY Signal’s arithmetic.

Finance is the standout gain, 26 to 69. Its 2027 pages put Treasury, Real Property Tax Services, Management and Budget and Financial Operations inside it. The 2021 edition already had Finance at 81 in January 2018; neither edition says which functions moved in.

Facilities Management (103 to 125) maintains county buildings and other assets. Personnel (25 to 36) runs human resources and civil service for the county and its local civil divisions, and added 6 in the past year. The Election Board (16 to 24) added 4 in the past year.

The County Attorney’s Law Department fell from 38 to 22, and from 32 to 22 in the past year alone, the largest one-year drop on the table, against 27 budgeted for 2027. The same budget lists “outside legal counsel” among its new baseline funding items. The document does not connect the two, and neither does CNY Signal.

Information Technology fell from 68 to 50, with 58 budgeted for 2027. Probation, which supervises offenders for the courts, fell from 91 to 72. Emergency Communication, the 911 center, went from 145 to 133. Water Environment Protection, the department behind the county’s sewer unit charge, went from 339 to 318. Health went from 294 to 278 but added 12 in the past year.

The DSS drop is a split, not a cut you can read off one row. DSS Economic Security fell from 674 to 470, but Children and Family Services and Adult and Long Term Care Services, absent in 2011, carry 294 and 51 in 2026, so the three lines together filled 815 positions, 141 more than DSS alone in 2011. The 2011 table also had Hillbrook (21), Youth Bureau (5), Mental Health (51) and Aging and Youth (12) lines that are blank from 2023 on. The table does not map those old lines to today’s departments, so CNY Signal did not net them.

Stop DWI, Correctional Health, Human Rights and LTC Community Services show no filled positions on any of the five dates, and the table does not explain the CNY Works line (2 in 2011, blank since). Diversity, blank in 2011, is the Office of Diversity and Inclusion: 5 in 2023 and 9 in 2026.

What happens next with the 2027 budget

These are proposed-budget numbers. The document’s Operating Budget Calendar calls for a public hearing between October 1 and 10, Legislature adoption by October 15, County Executive vetoes by October 20, Legislature action on vetoes by October 25, and a final deadline of the first Monday in November, which is November 2, 2026.

CNY Signal transcribed the table, re-added every column to check the printed totals and computed all changes and percentages here; the 2018 and 2021 Adopted Budgets and the Legislature’s February 7, 2023 session packet supplied the Corrections history.