City aldermen question firefighter hiring rule

04/20/2007

William Kaempffer , Register Staff

NEW HAVEN — In a strong signal to City Hall, 20 aldermen have requested a public hearing on the Fire Department hiring process, which came under scrutiny after widespread confusion about the entry-level exam. Alderman Jorge Perez, D-5, one of the initial six lawmakers to request the hearing, stressed the importance of transparency, given the city’s history of lost legal battles over hiring and promotions. Fourteen other members of the 30-member board later joined the request.

"This process in the fire test was done in such a way that leaves so many questions," said Perez. "Ultimately, if this ends up in court, it ends in litigation, and we lose. Then the Board of Aldermen has to come up with the money."

A focus of the aldermanic inquiry is the administration’s decision to make the written portion pass/fail on the Fire Department entry exam and rank candidates only on oral boards, which 70 percent of candidates failed. Perez said he’s concerned about a lack of clarity and consistency in the process. Some candidates had two people scoring their oral board, others three. Many candidates were unaware of how tests would be graded. And some people who failed the orals couldn’t review their answers because no sessions were recorded.

The civil service entry exams have three components: written multiple choice questions, the oral board and a physical agility test, which remaining candidates completed this week.

When the city hired police recruits months earlier, written and oral scores were combined to rank candidates.

Aldermen are questioning why so many people, most importantly the Board of Fire Commissioners and candidates themselves, were in the dark that the Fire Department tests would be scored differently.

Robert Smuts, the city’s chief administrative officer, said it was the city’s intention from the start to rank recruits on oral scores, although that wasn’t initially understood even in City Hall.

"There was a little confusion internally as the test was getting under way," Smuts said, but everyone now is on the same page. The grading decision, he said, was based on the testing consultant’s recommendation that the oral test was the better indicator of who would be the best candidates.

With the police test, administered by a different firm, it made sense, Smuts said, to combine scores, as police officers use different skill sets in their jobs, including a lot of report writing.

"We’re happy to go over with the Board of Aldermen these questions," he said.

But, he said, aldermen "have to be aware of their role and their potential for exacerbating the tensions that do exist around fire tests by politicizing the process. There will be all sorts of conspiracy theories and that happens when something as important as the hiring process is at stake."

He said he doesn’t know that will happen, but the board "should be on guard against not doing that."

However, Firefighter Patrick Egan, fire union president, "absolutely" believes the city intended to combine scores in the Fire Department, too, but changed gear for whatever reason in the middle of the process. Testing consultants even explicitly said the scores would be combined at a meeting with firefighters in February, before the written test, he said.

If the city planned to use only oral scores from the start, why did all the study material focus on the written component, including a practice written exam, with no mention of the oral, he asked.

Also, why would the testing company, CWH Management Solutions, tout on its Web site its written exam as "award winning" and "best entry-level firefighter exam available on the market," and then recommend it not be counted, Egan asked.

Of 770 people who took the oral test, 226 passed. The city didn’t have figures for how many people passed the agility test, which was completed Thursday. A reporter was denied access to the exam site at the fire training academy.

In the past, the city hired police and firefighters using pass-fail written exams, allowing city officials to choose from a large pool of undifferentiated candidates, which ensured diverse academy classes and, critics say, landed the politically connected jobs.

In 2006, a Superior Court judge struck that down as illegal under the charter.