Long Beach’s Civil Service Commission this week continued to lambast a proposal from the mayor and city manager that’s intended to speed up hiring, give preference to local college graduates and centralize employment decisions in the Human Resources Department.
At first glance, the idea is appealing, according to Civil Service Commissioner Robyn Gordon-Peterson, who compared it to a delicious-looking dinner of a filet mignon, a baked potato dripping with butter and a few perfectly cooked spears of asparagus.
But, Gordon-Peterson said, tucked on the side of the plate is “a scoop of poo.”
“You going to eat that steak? You really want that steak?” Gordon-Peterson said.
Support watchdog journalism
Who has eyes on City Hall? We do. The Long Beach Post is now a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Donate now to support independent accountability journalism that cuts through the political spin.
In Gordon-Peterson’s analogy, that “poo” is a portion of the proposal that would take hiring functions away from the Civil Service Department and centralize them in the Human Resources Department, something she and other commissioners argues opens the doors to unfairness and bias in the hiring process.
Gordon-Peterson made her vivid comments at a Wednesday meeting where she and other Civil Service Commissioners voted unanimously to oppose the changes, which the mayor and city manager have proposed in a charter amendment that voters could decide on in the November election.
Civil Service Commissioners have argued for weeks that their department is not the only thing holding up the hiring process, and doing away with its role would be a shortsighted decision that erodes a safeguard against cronyism and politically motivated hiring decisions.
Commissioner Jose Osuna said the changes are not reform but are “a slow death for the Civil Service process.”
Currently, the Civil Service Department, which is overseen by the Civil Service Commission, tests and ranks potential job candidates at the beginning of the process before candidates move on to interviews with other departments and onboarding through the Human Resources Department.
City officials say it’s inefficient to have hiring spread across multiple departments. It currently takes about seven months to fill an open job in the city, something that’s contributed to 22% of jobs being vacant.
To fix this, City Manager Tom Modica and Mayor Rex Richardson have proposed centralizing hiring in the Human Resources Department.
As a safeguard, the Civil Service Commission would still hear appeals from employees who think they were treated unfairly. For instance, if they disagree with discipline handed down by the City Manager, who is the city’s top executive, employees could appeal to the commission, but commissioners have said this amounts to an empty promise. They say they would have to rely on evidence presented by employees in the Human Resources Department, which is overseen by the City Manager’s office, something commissioners called a conflict of interest.
City Manager Modica has tried to assuage the commission’s concerns, including in a six-page letter he sent this week in response to a letter the commission sent him last week.
Modica said Human Resources will still use merit-based hiring, including a practice called “banding,” that ranks recruits to help ensure the most qualified candidates are interviewed first. Veterans, local college graduates, interns and the city’s current part-time employees would get a leg up in that process.
However, Modica said that the city would continue to use a “non-competitive” hiring process for some jobs, as it does today.
Modica also assured the commission it would still be able to investigate and rule on employee discipline appeals, although he did not say who would be providing information to the commission for those investigations.
He pointed to other city commissions, like the Planning Commission, which decides zoning issues and approves or denies building projects, as an example of how a commission can still be independent while hearing appeals of decisions made by city departments.
Under Modica’s plan, any Civil Service investigation into allegations that applicable rules and regulations aren’t being followed would have to be initiated by the City Council.
Modica said the city attorney would play a key role in these investigations and in making sure the commission’s decisions were upheld. However, Civil Service Commission Chair Erik Frost Hollins noted that the words “city attorney” appear zero times in the proposed language of the charter amendment. He said if it’s not in the charter “it’s a promise without enforceability.”
“That’s a leap of faith that we haven’t established that that faith has been earned yet,” Frost Hollins said.
Frost Hollins made the motion for the commission to oppose the charter amendment.
The commission’s vote does not stall the process. The City Council can still vote to send the charter amendment to voters, who would need to approve it with a simple majority in November.
That could happen after the city finished meeting with labor groups. Some employee labor groups, including the city’s largest, have signaled they won’t support the proposal as written.
City officials had originally planned to ask the City Council to vote on the proposal in mid-April but have since announced that the vote could be pushed to May to allow more time to speak with city labor groups. The last day the City Council could vote to put the issue on the ballot is Aug. 6.