I would start by saying it is important for the department to assess the nature of the contracts, how long people have been there, and whether they possess a certain expertise that no one else has. The department needs to assess if they have knowledge, for example, of a system that nobody else has and then work with that person to try to bring that knowledge in-house so that you have a bit of a safeguard. The example is always this: what happens if that person gets hit by a bus? It comes back to analyzing the risks around that and then trying to mitigate those risks to the extent that you can perhaps bring them in-house.
With most of these people, if they are contracting, it's because they want to be contractors. So it's trying to analyze it--