Last
week, the city’s personnel director Lisa Hudson ruled a batch of Fire
Department promotions were tainted by discrimination. In 2016, Chief Timothy
McConnell promoted dozens of firefighters to captain’s rank, under revised
rules stemming from Mayor Mitch
Landrieu’s “Great Place to Work” Initiative. The package’s promotion claims
the effort is to “create a merit-based employment structure where decisions
about hiring, promotion, and pay are made based on the individual employee’s
abilities and performance” and it would “modernize – not eliminate – our civil
service system.”
Civil service systems exist to ensure extraneous
factors that don’t bear on doing the best job possible don’t influence
decisions to hire, fire, promote, demote, or other reward or punish government
employees. But changes made under the initiative’s aegis allowed precisely
this.
The old rules specified that hiring would occur with the number of candidates equaling the number of slots – jobs or promotions – open plus two. These also permitted for large numbers of openings to be organized by bands according to similarity in score values, where the appointer had to exhaust the band’s population prior to moving on to the next, lower one.
The new
rules sweep away these requirements. These abolish the banding strategy and
state that hiring or promotion occurs from the entire register of individuals
who score passing on the merit provisions governing that personnel action.
Following those, McConnell took the 120 and promoted
41. However, he jumped all over the list, promoting someone who had ranked 114th
while rejecting that for dozens who scored higher. This prompted 47 passed over
to ask for the ruling. McConnell justified this by saying other factors such as
education, training, and interviews informed his decisions. Yet none of these
were encapsulated into the rules as permissible criteria, if not prohibited.
Further, that apparently runs afoul of the Louisiana Constitution,
which forces upon New Orleans, with its system specifically written into the Constitution,
that it uses the rule of openings plus two and that qualifications be “ascertained
by examination which, so far as practical, shall be competitive.” The results
caused a problem in the distribution of promotions – disproportionately elevating
blacks, with many of lower scores gaining it while higher-scoring whites did
not.
Hudson therefore called for abolishing the
initiative’s rule changes. She did not address whether McConnell consciously
had picked black candidates over whites, but the initiative did explicitly call
for diversification of the city workforce in a new rule that states “The City
shall make efforts to provide recruitment opportunities intended to attract
qualified candidates who reflect the demographics of the city.”
Regardless of motives, the rules do seem to
contravene the Constitution, and the city should follow Hudson’s
recommendation, at least as far as the procedures dealing with openings. Yet
whether Landrieu, who initiated and trumpeted the changes, would abandon it with
the subsequent blow to his pride and legacy seems doubtful.
He may have the city appeal to the its Civil
Service Commission or into the judicial system, which if not upholding Hudson’s
decision probably would provoke one, some, or all of the 47 not promoted to
appeal further into the judiciary. Hudson recommended 15 additional promotions
from the 47.
By contrast, when assuming office, Cantrell has no
vested political interest in the system. Avoiding likely years of litigation over
rules of dubious constitutionality is in the city’s best interest, so if the
issue still burns at her inauguration, she should scrap the initiative and deliver
redress to aggrieved firefighters.
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