Fire Dept. hiring practices raise questions

Friday, April 6, 2007 3:00 AM EDT
By William Kampffer

NEW HAVEN — City hiring practices are again raising eyebrows after officials decided to grade prospective firefighters exclusively on the oral section of a Civil Service exam that more than two-thirds of the test takers flunked.

Top city officials, however, maintain the high failure rate was neither a concern nor unexpected because the oral test was intentionally "rigorous" in an effort to find the best candidates and whittle the pool to a more manageable level.

The city expects to hire only about 25 firefighters this year and more than 1,300 people initially applied.

Of the 770 remaining candidates who took the oral boards last month, only 226 people got a passing grade, a failure rate of almost 70 percent that left some people questioning the exam.

At the same time, other questions arose after the city indicated it would not include scores from the written portion of the hiring exam in final calculations to determine who gets hired.

Final ranks will be determined by the oral score plus any extra residency or veteran points for which a candidate is eligible. The other two testing components, the written exam and physical agility, must be passed but will not count to that score.

That decision, according to Chief Administrative Officer Rob Smuts, was based on the recommendation of the city’s testing consultants, CWH Management Solutions of Colorado. John M. Ford, testing services manager for the company, said it’s common for clients to give oral scores a 100 percent weight. In fact, he said, every one of CWH clients that contract to use the firm’s oral exam count it as 100 percent of the final score, he said.

News that the written part would be pass/fail, however, caught many people in New Haven off guard, especially in light of a 2006 Superior Court case in which Judge Jon C. Blue concluded the city’s process of conducting pass/fail exams for police and firefighters was illegal.

The city’s position is this new process is in compliance with that ruling.

"I think the (court) case was very specific about saying that we couldn’t have only pass/fail components, that we have to have some measure of ranking," said Smuts. "But it did not say that the written step could not be pass/fail."

When asked if he issued any legal opinion on the subject, Corporation Counsel Thomas W. Ude Jr. Thursday said "no one asked for one because it so obviously did not violate" Blue’s ruling.

The decision nonetheless surprised many who thought the city would calculate rankings by combining written and oral scores.

"That’s what I think everybody thought, and not limited to the firefighters," Fire Union President Patrick Egan said.

Equally in the dark was the Board of Fire Commissioners, a panel of civilians appointed by the mayor to oversee the fire service.

"My expectation was that the written was to count toward the final grade. The board was pretty unanimous in that belief," said Fire Commission Chairman William Celentano.

A meeting Tuesday with city officials was the first time Celentano heard differently.

The board asked when the decision was made, but didn’t get a clear answer, he said.

In New Haven, this is the first round of Fire Department hirings under a new process mandated by the 2006 lawsuit, which was filed by Matthew Hurley, an unsuccessful applicant who claimed hiring practices in the Police and Fire departments violated the city charter. He won.

"It seems to me that once again the administration is trying to squirrel around a judge’s decision," said attorney Karen Torre, who represented Hurley and is a harsh critic of what she characterizes as the city’s race-based promotional practices. The city has paid, or has committed to pay, her clients more than $1.5 million to settle lawsuits in recent years over illegal promotional practices in the Police Department.

The backdrop to all of this is a litigious history in the fire service where civil service exams rarely go unchallenged at some level, whether in accusations of breaches in testing security to full-blown lawsuits.