GREENFIELD — As the city’s fire and police chief advocated for moving away from Civil Service, albeit with the police hoping to go through the process faster than the fire department, one point began to rise to the top of the conversation: money.
Both the police and fire departments are spending drastically over allotted overtime budgets, roughly somewhere between two to three times more than what they plan. It is typically as a result of not having enough full-time staff — which can oftentimes happen because it’s difficult to hire with the Civil Service guidelines, the chiefs explained at a public hearing Thursday night at the John Zon Community Center.
“This is not a case of poor management or poor administration,” Public Safety Commission Vice Chairman Gary Longley said. “This isn’t small dollars. Those dollars for the taxpayer could be better well served with people in their jobs than with people working overtime. I think that’s one of the strongest points.”
Longley and Chairman Butch Hawkins advocated for removing the city from Civil Service, while some members of the City Council also embraced the potential change.
The joint hearing of the Public Safety Commission and the council’s Appointments and Ordinances Committee Thursday was the first major public step toward examining whether it makes sense to remove Civil Service from bottom-to-chief for police and fire departments.
If the council wants to it can begin the removal through vote of the full council.
Police Chief Robert Haigh continued to advocate for the city to leave Civil Service with the hope in the coming months of removing the laws that dictate how the department hires.
“We’re not going to make everybody happy,” Haigh said, but, “I can tell you right now the system is broken for us.”
Greenfield Fire Chief Robert Strahan called to pump the breaks on the discussion, which is separate from the police but happening concurrently — but to still make a decision on the direction within the coming months.
“I’m forcing the conversation because we need to have that conversation,” Strahan said.
At-Large Councilor Isaac Mass voiced two major concerns: ensuring the protection of veterans and hoping to remove any potential politicization of the selection of future chiefs.
Haigh pointed to the fact the city will have time to decide on chief hiring practices.
“I want to be here. I don’t want to be anywhere else,” Haigh said. “This is the last police job I want.”
The chiefs and union stewards advocated for strict and thorough policies governing how the departments will hire and, more specifically, promote.
The police union, represented primarily by Lt. Todd Dodge, and the fire union by Lt. Peter McIver, both emphasized they wanted to make sure the union contracts are negotiated fairly and with enough information before moving forward.
“The reality is I want to put the Fire Department in the best position for the future,” Strahan said. “The first step is to hire good people. I’m not saying we don’t hire good people. What I’m saying is what’s become so cumbersome for us is a challenge in the last few years is to have a good pool of candidates to choose from.”
Both chiefs have said Civil Service can severely limit the hiring abilities of the respective departments.
Civil Service “really hampers communities like ours,” Haigh said previously. He said it can also limit the department’s ability to diversify its police force.
It it is difficult to hire people who live locally for a handful of reasons. Sometimes people have aged out of qualifying to take the test even though they were already an officer elsewhere. For others it’s about living close enough to Greenfield to qualify to work here.
Based on Civil Service guidelines, the public safety official needs to live within 10 miles of the department.
When Haigh worked in Orange and wanted to transfer to Greenfield, he had to find a new home and move. In rural, spread-out Franklin County people may live within a reasonable drive away but not within the 10 miles required by Civil Service, unlike someone who may live within 10 miles of say Boston but in city-time the distance is functionally farther.
The Civil Service statewide list is typically filled with people living in the eastern part of the state. This can complicate the hiring process and often slows it down, Haigh said.
The job first has to be offered to the person at the top of the list, and then they have to say whether they want it before you can move down to the next name.
Currently, 41 percent of the 351 municipalities in Massachusetts use the Civil Service exam to determine potential police officers for its departments.
The only two communities in Franklin County’s 26 communities that use the Civil Service exam to find its police officers are Greenfield and Montague; additionally, Athol, in Worcester County, uses the exam.
If the city wants to leave Civil Service, it likely would need to do so by a two-thirds vote of the Greenfield City Council. Typically it has to be removed the way it came in, but the city approved it at Town Meeting at the time. City officials await an official opinion from the city attorney.
While it is understood their individual protections will be grandfathered, there are questions of whether the city’s financial investments in training the firefighters will go to waste if they chose to leave the department.