City hopes to clear public safety hiring

SOUTH PORTLAND — Two years ago, when Portland hit a budget brick wall and laid off several firefighters, South Portland Fire Chief Kevin Guimond saw “a prefect opportunity” to pick up some fully trained, certified staffers.

“We should have been right there knocking on their doors, saying come on across the bridge, we’ll take you in, but we can’t do that,” Guimond said, during a recent City Council workshop.

When told they had to wait until the annual testing process run by South Portland Civil Service Commission each fall before they could even apply, most of the potential recruits simply faded into the suburbs, said Guimond, taking jobs with municipal and volunteer departments that would sign them on right away.

That’s because the cumbersome, largely archaic civil service process forces potential new hires to jump through hoops regardless of prior experience, and those hoops are held aloft only once per year for the fire department, twice for police. However, efforts to streamline the hiring process have become bogged down, with commission members and city staffers at odds regarding how far the changes should go.

South Portland is one of only three cities in Maine that still has a civil service commission to oversee hiring in the police and fire departments, the others being Portland and Lewiston. Such entities, said City Councilor Tom Coward, “were a very valuable addition to city government back when they were proposed before the 1930s, to stop nepotism.”

“They were meant to stop when a new mayor came in and suddenly all the patrolmen and firefighters were his nephews and cousins and friends and business associates and children of business associates,” said Coward. “I think the world has moved beyond this and I would not be opposed to eliminate the Civil Service Commission completely.”

City Manage Jim Gailey said he’s not pushing to kill the commission, just to loosen its stranglehold on the process.

“Being able to hire that person right out of the gate would save a lot of time for the applicant and the department, and a lot of expense to the taxpayer,” said Gailey, pointing out that those willing to wait on the city tend to require a fair amount of training, and that’s if they’re up to snuff at all.

According to George Hackett, chairman of South Portland’s seven-member Civil Service Commission, 50 people applied for fire department jobs last fall. Just 39 passed the written test. All but 17 washed out of the agility test. Two more got tripped up in the oral interviews.

And that’s before the background checks, which Police Chief Ed Googins said cost him more potential hires than any other part of the process.

“We could not fill out three positions in the current academy, because we ran out of names,” said Googins. “What we need are more candidates to look at in a shorter period of time.”

“What I’m looking for is a rolling process, not one that happens once a year,” agreed Guimond.

In 2010, city staff tried to craft amendments to the ordinance governing the commission in hope of streamlining the process. The seven-member commission set those amendments aside after the firefighters’ union rejected them.

“We thought it was too major a rewrite of the ordinance,” said Mike Williams, president of Local 1476 International Association of Fire Fighters.

Instead, the commission began work on its own version, which, Gailey said, saw undue union influence. As proof, he points out that while the hiring process for firefighters saw few changes, many of the city’s proposals for police officers, supported by the police union, made it into the commission-authored amendments. That has resulted in an ordinance proposal in which trained police officers coming from another department can be exempted from certain testing, while firefighters, even certified paramedics, must start at square one.

“My concern is, what part does the union have in our hiring process?” asked Gailey, rhetorically. “This is really not an ordinance amendment the union should have any say in. I can see if we’re talking about modifying the promotions process, but we did not touch that. For an applicant to come through the system and be ultimately hired, he or she had to be on the job for one year before they’re even invited into the union. So, these are not union positions.”

For his part, Hackett said Gailey created a “pretty muddy process,” by presenting councilors with both the ordinance changes OK’d by his commission, as well as those originally proposed by city staff.

“It was not presented to them by the city manager in typical fashion, typical being that normally only the proposed changes are provided to them and nothing more,” said Hackett. “You would have to ask the city manager or some of the council members as to why they felt this time needed to be different.”

That juxtaposition did cause some concern among councilors at their Feb. 13 workshop, prompting a can’t-we-all-get-along response.

“I do get really concerned when it looks like you have the city in opposition to a commission,” said Councilor Maxine Beecher. “I don’t see any reason they could both have been working on this together for the past two years.”

“I don’t enjoy being presented with two opposing views this evening, and the difference between the two proposals is considerable,” agreed Councilor Tom Blake, a former firefighter and IAFF Local 1476 president. “For 30 years, there had been a power struggle between the Civil Service Commission and city administration. There’s no question about that.

“I see the city’s proposal as a clear rewrite of the Civil Service Ordinance, an attempt to weaken it considerably, in an effort to give city staff and department heads a greater ability to hire, promote and fire,” said Blake.

Gailey denied this charge, saying he only wants to put South Portland on an even keel with surrounding cities and towns, which can hire at will, without a rigorous civil service vetting process.

“We’re just trying to bring in the best and brightest to our police and fire departments,” he said.

But Blake saw it differently.

“This is not an attempt to streamline the process. It’s an attempt to undermine the authority and ability of the commission,” he said. “It undermines the protections over 100 of our employees need.”

Among other things, Blake objected to a change in the city proposal that took the interview process from a commission responsibility and set up a new interview board for the fire department that includes the fire chief, another fire department member, the city’s human resources director, and just three of the seven commission members.

The largest change in the commission-drafted update is the creation of a hiring process exemption for previously certified police officers, referred to as “blue pins” in the trade, along with more frequent hiring boards to help speed those trained officers into service. This “second list” of applicants has a so-called “sunset provision” of Dec. 31, 2013, at which time it must be re-adopted to continue.

Both Googins and Guimond said they approved of the commission draft as a starting point, although Guimond said he wanted a similar process to enable him to bring paramedics on staff without a laborious application process. Essentially, they said, they are losing qualified candidates to departments that did not even exist when South Portland created the civil service hiring process it continues to live by.

“We’re in competition now with smaller departments that hire paramedics,” said Guimond. “We’re in the same pool looking for quality people and our system has become cumbersome.”

The council sent the commissions ordinance draft back for reconsideration, with hopes something better aligned with the city version can be created. The goal, said Mayor Patti Smith, is to get something back for review by the council within the next two months – not forever in municipal terms, but far off for Guimond, who needs to fill five positions and only has one paramedic in the current approved applicant list.

According to Hackett, the chief may have to wait even longer than he’d like.

“Despite the call of some council members to move this forward in weeks rather then months, it does not appear we will be back on the agenda any time soon,” he wrote, in a recent email reply to a request for comment.  “Although language concerning paramedics appeared to be all that needed to be added, we have been told to expect more requests for changes beyond that one from the city. 

“I guess you can't rush city hall,” said Hackett.

That, at least, is something the council seems to agree with.

“We rarely move from an imperfect to a perfect situation right away,” said Councilor Gerard Jalbert.