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NEWS | LABOR
To Hire and Fire Amid questions and a legal challenge, the mayor’s hiring and firing powers continue to expand BY HEIDI GROOVER
W
hether contracting city work to private companies or seeking out city employees with private sector expertise, Mayor David Condon has made it known he’s looking to run City Hall more like a private business. In his latest move, Condon has pushed for more hiring and firing power over highranking city officials, and he looks poised to win the newest increase on that front Monday. In April, the city’s fire and police departments reorganized, rebranding as divisions and adding new departments to increase the number of positions filled through appointments instead of civil service, the testing process used to hire and discipline city employees. Department heads are exempted from that process, so creating new departments offers the chance for the mayor to appoint more people, who are then approved by the City Council. Now, the Parks and Recreation Department is proposing a similar move, creating four departments within it and 10 total exempt positions, up from the current two. Between the three divisions, that’s a jump from six to 40 exempt positions. Like Police and Fire, Parks is unlikely to fill them all immediately, but the changes pave the way for the future. In a city of more than 2,000 employees, the proportion remains small, but the changes have prompted discussions of nepotism, due process and the city’s historic civil service process. The administra-
tion says changes will help create efficiencies because department heads will have more flexibility to hire the best people to help run their departments — people vulnerable to firing if they don’t do their jobs well. “Folks are being held accountable in ways they’ve never been held accountable before,” says the mayor’s spokesman Brian Coddington. But others worry it’s exempting too many people from important checks Condon has made it clear he wants to make sure they’re qualified for their to run the city like a business. jobs while making entire departments vulnerable to the whim of every new mayor. Soon after the earlier change, the firefighters union sued the city over whether the move was legal, but that case won’t be heard until next summer. Council President Ben Stuckart, who opposed the changes because they didn’t happen at the same time as department budgeting, as outlined in the city charter, now says he’s on board with the Parks change because it was postponed to align with the budget, on
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Learn more at an upcoming information meeting: gonzaga.edu/infomtg 20 INLANDER SEPTEMBER 26, 2013