Idea #33 -- Civil Service

Idea #33 – Civil Service

Report Status: Fully Reviewed

Researched by: Anne Helgen

Original Idea as Submitted

Determine financial impact of leaving Civil Service

Other ideas included in this report

None

Idea intent

Use data to help make decision on Civil Service

Weighted Final Score: 70 (Financial Impact: 4, Operational Impact: 9, Time Scale: 2, Ease of Implementation: 2)

Background Information

The Massachusetts Civil Service Act was established in 1884 to take turn-of-the-century political patronage out of the hiring process by replacing political appointees with staffing based on merit, as determined through Civil Service exams. The Civil Service Unit is a subdivision of the Massachusetts Human Resources Division, enabled by Massachusetts General Laws, Part I, Title IV, Chapter 31¹. Currently, Belmont police and fire department employees are hired, promoted, disciplined, and terminated according to Civil Service Law.

The Civil Service Unit provides both entry level testing and promotional testing and produces a Civil Service eligibility “list” based on exam scores, adjusted for candidates that have preferred status, such as residents (applicants who resided in the community for 12 months prior to the exam), veterans and disabled veterans, children of public safety employees killed or severely injured in the line of duty, and anyone who was laid off state-wide. These are absolute preference categories and require anyone within these groups who score a passing grade to be placed at the top of the list. Civil Service communities must hire candidates in the order provided by the “list” published by Civil Service, even if a lower listed candidate is more qualified. The exam is a multiple-choice general knowledge test given every two years and the minimum requirement for applicants is a high school diploma (or GED) and a driver’s license. (Note: As of October 2021, Civil Service exams for Police Officers and Firefighters will be administered annually.) Results are returned in about six months. When the list is posted, candidates have a limited time (seven days or so) to notify communities of their intent to apply.

Once hired, Civil Service mandates the process for hiring, promotion, discipline, termination, and lay-offs of employees. It provides a predictable and easy way to understand the set of criteria for advancement (“career ladder”), rewards longevity with seniority, and takes the local administration out of decisions around promotions and job descriptions. In addition to the hiring and promotional process, Civil Service created the Civil Service Commission to provide an extra layer of protection for Civil Service employees. The Commission hears and decides appeals filed by Civil Service employees and candidates relating to discipline (note: the MA Police Reform bill of 2020² has removed this as an avenue for police officers to appeal discipline), layoffs, termination, bypass of promotion, and classifications and is authorized to overrule the appointing authority’s decision. This protection under Civil Service laws is intended to ensure that employment decisions are based on Civil Service parameters and that all individuals receive fair and impartial treatment as dictated by Civil Service rules. The Civil Service Commission appeals process is additional to other avenues of recourse such as union collective bargaining contract progressive discipline and grant grievance and arbitration provisions, the Labor Relations Commission, the MCAD, the EEOC, and the courts.

For Belmont, as well as many other small Massachusetts communities, filling vacancies under Civil Service rules has proven increasingly difficult, particularly for the Police Department. The number of Civil Service-eligible candidates applying for Belmont police officer positions has dropped precipitously, to the point where the number of vacancies can equal or be higher than the total number of applicants for those jobs in any year. This is less true of the Fire Department, however, there are fewer candidates–which can impact the number of quality candidates–than in the past. This reflects both the fact that the number of resident Belmont applicants choosing public safety as a career has declined over time, as well national trends which show overall declines in police officer and firefighter applicants, due in part to earlier retirements at younger ages and a retirement “bubble” of those hired in the 1990s.

Illustrative of this problem is the Belmont Police Department’s recent attempt to fill four vacancies. The Civil Service list posted in late October of 2020 included five candidates who signed up to work in Belmont. One was outside age criteria; Belmont made four conditional offers. One withdrew and the remaining three did not pass standards set by the Civil Service, including two who failed multiple attempts at the Civil Service Physical Ability Test (PAT) –the last of which was administered in August 2021. After 10 months, the Police Department had zero hires to fill vacant positions—and is starting over again with this year’s list. The protracted vacancies generate overtime and other costs for the department and also can affect the morale of the force as well as the quality of service.

Another costly aspect of Civil Service for smaller towns is the provision that allows for lateral transfers from the hiring department after one year of service. This means that non-residents can choose to apply to a town with limited resident applications (such as Belmont), obtain employment within Civil Service, go through the training process and transfer when eligible to be closer to their home or to join a larger or more “desirable” department. This results in significant lost investment in expenditures such as academy and in-house field training, custom-fitted uniforms and turn-out gear, and time and effort for the department that initiated the Civil Service hire. Such turnover adds vacancies and overtime costs and contributes to lowering the overall experience level of the department. While not all transfers are a result of this dynamic, Belmont’s Fire Department has experienced this kind of turnover, and, to a lesser degree, the Police Department has as well.

Vacancies in the Fire Department create higher overtime expenditures than in the Police Department. This is because the Fire Department is required by collective bargaining contract to maintain a minimum staff of 11 firefighters for each of four shifts (44). The Department budgets and staffs 12 per shift (48) so that overtime is not incurred for vacations, personal leave, injuries, etc. For each vacancy beyond one per shift, the Department is required to fill the vacancy with another firefighter at overtime pay. A vacancy that lasts one year represents 2,200 hundred hours of overtime per year, not including additional overtime needed to cover vacations, personal leave, injuries. The Police Department has more flexibility to manage overtime during vacancies. Belmont’s Public Safety overtime costs in FY22 are expected to be in significantly in excess of budgeted overtime due in part to the high number of vacancies in the Fire Departments and Police Departments. A breakout of overtime by type (injuries, vacancies, etc.) has been requested of the Chiefs.

In response to pressure from municipalities frustrated with the current process, the Massachusetts Legislature established the Special Legislative Commission to Study and Examine the Civil Service Law (under the Acts of 2020, Chapter 253 (Section 107)) to address widespread dissatisfaction with the current Civil Service processes and make recommendations for improvements. In May 2021, the Commission began meeting to study the employment, promotions, performance evaluation and disciplinary procedures for Civil Service employees as well as for municipalities not subject to the Civil Service law³. The commission is charged with making recommendations for changes to the Civil Service law to improve diversity, transparency, and representation of the community in recruitment, hiring and training of Civil Service employees, merit preference status, eligible lists, and appointment from eligible lists by hiring authorities. The commission will also make recommendations around these issues for municipalities not subject to the Civil Service law (and for the State Police). To date, the Commission and its Subcommittees have heard from municipalities operating with and without Civil Service, Police and Fire Chief Associations, Police, Firefighter and other law enforcement unions, veterans and disabled veterans’ associations, the Massachusetts Municipal Association, the ACLU, the NAACP, and the Human Resources Division.

Pros and Cons

Proponents of Civil Service highlight the objective standards by which public safety officers are hired and promoted, the value of the Civil Service Commission process for appealing promotion bypasses, discipline, layoffs, and termination that is removed from local influence, and the benefits of consistent standards for public safety officers across the Commonwealth. Public safety unions point out that local departmental control over hiring and firing can be subjective, based on local pressures and personalities rather than objective standards. Civil Service also protects department chiefs and administrators from pressure by residents who favor a particular candidate.

In recent testimony submitted to the legislature on behalf of the Massachusetts Coalition of Police⁴, attorney John Becker states that “police officers should be evaluated on merit alone” and that Civil Service “ensures that the legal standards are adhered to” when a municipality seeks to appoint or promote a public safety officer. He points out that the Commonwealth has developed standardized tests for physical fitness as well as standardized exams and that returning control of the system to municipalities would only increase the opportunities for local officials to use non-objective criteria—such as favoritism, personal preference and other, irrelevant criteria—in the decision-making process for hiring and promotional decisions. Eliminating Civil Service, per this testimonial letter, will fragment the system “into a hodgepodge of municipal hiring and promotional policies” that will duplicate costs and result in inconsistent standards across the state.

Critics of the system point out that the original merit-based intent of Civil Service has been undermined by numerous modifications over the years. As stated in a 2004 Pioneer Institute publication⁵, “for public safety employees…the concept of merit has been supplanted by a system of political preferences. The result is that for new hires, the test score has little or no bearing on where his or her name will appear on the hiring list.” The hiring process is also criticized for the length of time it takes to score and produce the Civil Service list (up to six months, in an era in which SAT scores are available immediately), which often results in loss of recruits to other job sectors. A 2021 Worcester study of Civil Service features a candidate who was not hired until two years after he passed the exam because of Civil Service protocol delays—and, by then, he had moved into the private sector⁶. The Civil Service Commission is also faulted for its slow process and backlog of cases. In 2020, the Commission reports that it took in 178 new appeals and ended the year with 156 pending appeals, 76 of which were more than 12 months old⁷. The average appeal cycle took more than 8 months—before any further appeals.

Critics also point to the rise and robustness of collective bargaining contracts during the 20th-century which replaced most, if not all, of the benefits of Civil Service, including the “career ladder” criteria for advancement, salary steps, procedures for lay-offs and discipline, and avenues for grievances and/or arbitration. Additionally, there is a growing sense among many departments that Civil Service rules and regulations often clash with a growing public service movement –and community expectations—calling for productivity, service orientation, and accountability, and away from rigid parameters⁸. Such critics believe that Civil Service creates disincentive rather than incentive for job improvement, a lack of accountability, and rewards longevity, not performance in the job.

A study of the pros and cons of Civil Service conducted by the Municipal Technical Advisory Service at the UTennessee Institute for Public Service⁹ states that, while Civil Service can professionalize the workforce in a politically driven form of government (weak or strong-mayor forms), civil service systems are probably least needed, and are thus the greatest hindrance to effective management, in cities with either the Council-Manager or Council-Administrator forms of government (or other professionally-based forms).” This is because no one elected person on the council or board can hire or fire employees alone and because the town administrator/manager is an appointed, not elected, position and has no “patronage” to appease. (As noted earlier, elimination of Civil Service can increase citizen pressure on department fire and police chiefs, who now have control over hiring decisions.) The study noted “that the rigidity of many civil service testing and advancement procedures have given rise to numerous criticisms, many of which point to the absence of other important hiring or advancement criteria (such as performance).”

Opting Out of Massachusetts Public Safety Civil Service

As of November 2021, there were 149 communities using Civil Service for public safety employment out of 351 cities and towns in Massachusetts. Thirty-nine communities withdrew from the Civil Service fire and/or police recruitment process within the past ten years, including, but not limited to, peer communities such as Acton, Burlington, Lexington, Norwood, Reading, Sudbury, Walpole, Wayland, Wellesley, and Westwood. In the past year, Swampscott and Mansfield voted to withdraw both fire and police from Civil Service, Franklin voted to withdraw fire from Civil Service (having already withdrawn police), and Falmouth, Foxborough, Framingham, Gardner, Hudson, Rockport, and Webster have withdrawn police from Civil Service. In March 2021, the Newton Police Reform Task Force, recommended leaving Civil Service in part to meet objectives for increasing diversity as well as to overcome barriers to effective recruitment.¹⁰ Other communities, such as Concord and Weston, do not hire through Civil Service.

Towns who have opted to leave Civil Service cite many reasons. In a June 2020 report conducted by Municipal Resources, Inc. (MRI) for the Town of Abington¹¹, towns withdrawing from the process cited “irregular testing intervals, rigid recruitment and selection parameters, residential and military preference requirements, and a cumbersome and antiquated discipline and termination hearing process, which often reduces or reverses personnel action at the local level, thereby restoring officers to their positions who have committed maleficence or wrongdoing.” Framingham cites the ability to “expand our ability to recruit, attract a larger pool of candidates, with the goal of creating a workforce that is reflective of the community we serve”¹². A report prepared by the Swampscott Civil Service study committee characterized civil service as a one-size-fits-all, rigid, time-consuming, and cumbersome operation. The state agency does not, committee members argued, account for an individual community’s needs and “the limitations imposed by the civil service system results in less diverse candidates to consider upon initial appointment and limits management discretion in the promotion of ranking officers”¹³. In a presentation to Massachusetts Municipal Association (MMA), the Wellesley and Norwood Police chiefs state “(t)he civil service system in Massachusetts is no longer up to the important task of helping government recruit and hire the most talented personnel”¹⁴.

In preparation for withdrawal from Civil Service, comprehensive personnel procedures need to be developed for hiring and promoting public safety employees. This includes identifying and setting standards for education requirements, diversity in gender or race, residency, language proficiency, EMS or other skill-based requirements, and developing tests to assess qualities and skill sets desired by the community. For promotional requirements, communities factor in attributes beyond test scores, such as work product, contribution to the community, performance evaluations, and attendance records as well as disciplinary records. The burden is on the town, in conjunction with the unions, to create legal, efficient, and comprehensive personnel procedures, including testing and a process for grievances that avoid any appearances of patronage. All of these require collective bargaining with the relevant unions to ensure that the replacement process is fair and objective. Towns also work with unions to review reduction-in-force language, arbitration rules and other collective bargaining topics to make sure union concerns are met. Most towns retain current Civil Service employees under Civil Service rules (including recourse to the Commission) while hiring new employees under non-Civil Service parameters. Other hiring protocols remain the same, such as background checks, drug testing, psychological evaluations, and physical ability tests. New recruits are trained through the same training academies and with the same level of local training.

Many non-Civil Service municipalities collaborate on the development of entry level testing and use a third-party vendor to administer and score the tests to spread out the cost of this component and create a fair and impartial process. Towns such as Lexington, North Reading, and Wellesley have developed mechanisms to objectively evaluate candidates for appointment that do not rely exclusively on test scores, residency, or set preferences categories and have created best-practice promotional processes that rely upon judgment, discretion, and other essential supervisory factors. A huge benefit is that, once these protocols are established, the towns can administer the exams when necessary, instead of waiting a year or more for the Civil Service exam and up to a year from exam to hiring.

Non-Civil Service communities report that the hiring process is more productive and faster than under Civil Service protocols. As an example, the Mashpee Police Chief is quoted as saying “we can promote an exam, get 50-60 takers and can start the background checks, and be interviewing candidates within the month.”¹⁵ Grafton Police Chief Crepeau states, “when we gave our test, the scores were out within a week. So we can move a lot faster, and that’s a big thing, especially with small departments.” He suggests that many police departments leave Civil Service because “doing so yields greater flexibility in hiring a lateral transfer, or seasoned officer from another police department” or from colleges and universities, or out-of-state departments. All of these efforts reduce costs by increasing the yield of hires as a percent of applicants, eliminating long delays and competition for training academies, and reducing the length of department vacancies.

Further Analysis

A review of the pros and cons of remaining with Civil Service compared to leaving Civil Service is provided below:

Pros and Cons of Civil Service (from employee’s point of view)

Table 2 – Bond Schedule for the substation project
Pros	Cons
Elimination of politics/patronage in hiring and promotions. Cannot be terminated without Civil Service process.	Continued high vacancies create pressure on existing staff.
Additional recourse through appeal to Civil Service Commission for bypassed promotions, discipline, and terminations, etc.	Drawn out process can create lower morale in the department.
Set criteria for advancement and seniority.	Does not reward performance; can be a demotivator for others in department.

: Table 2 – Bond Schedule for the substation project

Pros and Cons for adopting Non-Civil Service hiring rules (from Town’s point of view):

Pros	Cons
Attracts a larger pool of potential candidates (especially for Police), which can result in more targeted hiring, more qualified recruits, and higher ratio of applicants to the number of successful hires, saving upfront costs	Requires renegotiation of collective bargaining contracts, which may increase public safety expenditures
Local control over hiring, discipline and firing decisions	Potential for political/other influence on hiring, discipline and firing decisions
Improves entrance and promotional standards; not one size fits all; removes entry criteria that are barriers to diversity
Reduces time required between recruiting, exams, and hiring which lowers overtime costs associated with vacancies	Mixed department of Civil Service and Non-Civil Service can create departmental tensions
Examinations held as often as needed	Time and cost required to recruit and test candidates throughout the year vs. from Civil Service List
Can tailor recruitment to needs of department and hire skill sets to reflect town needs	May create significant initial turnover of employees who wish to stay in Civil Service departments
More flexibility to address discipline and termination issues; shorter time frame for resolution	More burden on administrators to create legal, efficient, and comprehensive personnel procedures, including testing and process for grievances, and to avoid any appearances of patronage
Ability to hire experienced candidates faster which saves training academy costs; lessens time from hiring to contributing member
Candidates who choose to apply non-Civil Service to Belmont likely to stay longer; less vacancies, more experienced force
Can structure promotional standards that enhance accountability and productivity
Provides management flexibility -eliminates convoluted system/detailed job descriptions that tie management’s hands	Risk of defending appropriateness of examinations and promotions against allegations of discrimination

Associated Costs/Savings:

Keep Civil Service		Adopt Non-Civil Service
Outcome	Costs	Outcome	Costs
No changes to collective bargaining	No additional costs needed to be negotiated	Collective bargaining negotiations	One-time and/or Recurring cost needed to be negotiated
Difficulty and cost of hiring public safety personnel	Recurring higher overtime costs Loss of significant upfront investment in personnel	Shorter term for vacancies -Town can recruit more frequently, initiate hiring at any time	Recurring lower overtime costs
Continued turnover, vacancies	Recurring higher overtime costs Decline in level of experience- “soft” cost	Experienced candidates	Training cost savings
Loss of service to the community with sustained vacancies	Decline in level of service-soft “cost”	Expenditures related to the development of exams, hiring practices, promotional standards, etc.	One-time up-front costs
		Possible longer average career in Belmont	Reduction in turnover costs such as uniforms, equipment, etc.
		Loss of personnel unhappy with non-civil service	One-time turnover and vacancy costs

Estimated Costs of Hiring Public Safety Officers

This idea asked for a determination of the financial aspect of leaving Civil Service. However, a complete cost/benefit evaluation requires collective bargaining with the four public safety unions, as well as estimates of the legal and procedural costs necessary to undertake candidate evaluations, etc. The numbers below provide insight into the overall costs of hiring public safety employees and of losing employees due to turnover.

The cost of evaluating any individual candidate for the Fire Department and the Police Department is the same whether or not the Town participates in Civil Service. However, based on comments from non-civil service departments (see above), it is logical to assume that the “yield percentage”, or the number of successful employment contracts divided into the number of candidates interviewed, will be significantly higher, resulting in lower overall hiring expenditures. Higher yields are the likely product of a broader pool of applicants, especially if the candidate is specifically interested in employment in Belmont beyond as a springboard for transfer. In the Police Department example cited above, the Department incurred evaluation costs for the four available Civil Service candidates, with a yield of zero. To the extent that the average tenure of non-civil service hires is higher, the department benefits from a more experienced unit and the upfront investments in training and equipment will be spread over more years, as opposed to lost when recently trained employees leave the department.

Of note, Watertown’s 2016-19 firefighter collective bargaining contract includes a clause that requires firefighters to repay a portion of training costs on a prorated basis if the firefighter leaves within five years to accept a public safety job in another town.

A cost that is not included here is the cost of recruitment. Civil Service departments do not incur costs because the recruitment is done on a state-wide basis and the list of candidates are provided to the Town. As a non-civil service community, the Town will be responsible for all outreach and recruiting costs.

Public Safety Hiring Process Costs

	Fire Department	Police Department
Task	Estimated $ Cost/Candidate	Estimated $ Cost/Candidate
Admin Time	$75	$75
Pre-Employment Administrative Time	$150	$150
Background Check	$1,000	$1500
Oral Interview	$254	$600
Physical and Psychological Exams, Medical and Drug Screening	$835	$1,315
Sub Total-Evaluation Only	$2,060	$3,640

Uniforms/Turn Out Gear	$8,000	$200
Training (Academy, In house, etc.)	$9,760	$3,800
Orientation	$90
In-house Training	$1,670
Recruits Salary and Benefits at Academy*	$10,000	$24,000
Total Cost	$31,580	$31,640
Other		See below

Sources: Belmont Police Chief, Belmont Fire Department Chief

*Based on salary of approximately $1,000 per week during training.

Other police compensation during training: use of cruiser, 10 weeks compensation of Field Training officers with time

Academy costs: use of cruiser for one week, ammunition

Recommendations

After an evaluation of the benefits and risks to the Town, the SCIG recommends that the Town continue to pursue withdrawal from Civil Service.
- This is more urgent issue for the Police Department, which has had four vacancies that it has been unable to fill through Civil Service since 2020. This in turn impacts overtime costs as well as overall delivery of police department services.
- Filling vacancies is less problematic for the Fire Department, however, the period from Civil Service exams to hiring and training to in-service firefighter can be up to a year, which can have a direct and significant impact on overtime. The Fire Department had six vacancies at the end of FY21 and has filled five, three of which will not be available for service until March and two of which will not be in service until April. Under Civil Service rules, firefighters can transfer after one year’s employment, which results in a loss of more than $30,000 in the Town’s upfront investment in training and customized gear. The primary reason given for leaving the Department is to move to a department closer to home.
- While the SCIG recommends withdrawing for both the Police and Fire Department, the implementation of the recommendation requires negotiating separate collective bargaining contracts and it may be more practical to withdraw the Police Department independent from the Fire Department, as other communities have done.
The SCIG recommends that, prior to an annual town meeting vote on withdrawal from Civil Service, the Town conduct a cost/savings analysis for each of the departments to fully understand the impact on the General Fund Budget. Such analysis would include:
- Collective bargaining terms to be negotiated. Union support is preferred for successful withdrawal.
- Estimated overtime costs/savings from Civil Service vacancies over time
- Initial impact of expected turnover among personnel who wish to remain in Civil Service.
- Estimated cost of recruiting candidates and administering an alternative program as stand-alone town.

The financial impact of leaving Civil Service should also be balanced against the non-financial benefits and costs. Non-financial benefits include the ability to tailor hiring to meet the Town’s needs and required skill sets, an increase in overall quality and diversity of candidates, possible improvements in quality of service, and management flexibility/ local control of decisions. Non-financial costs include potential tensions that can arise in “mixed” civil service/non-civil service departments, additional burden on Department administrators to avoid the appearance of favoritism, and possible difficulty attracting candidates interested in working in this region to a town surrounded by Civil Service towns (Arlington, Cambridge, Waltham and Watertown).

Next Steps

Select Board and Town Administrator to:

Continue discussions with unions with the goal of withdrawing from Civil Service with union support. Priority should be given to renegotiating the Police Department contract.
As part of negotiations, continue the discussion of terms and conditions for an alternate system for hiring in Police Department and Fire Department.
Forecast savings and costs to determine the net benefit/loss for the Town.
Present formal withdrawal article to Town Meeting with union support.
Leverage existing work done in non-civil service communities to develop exams, and other necessary guidelines.