SWAMPSCOTT — The town committee tasked with researching Civil Service has been formed, and at the next Town Meeting it will make a recommendation on whether the town’s police and fire chiefs should be removed from the system.
However, at the last Select Board meeting, there was some debate over the process that formed the committee.
At the annual Town Meeting in June, Swampscott was originally set to vote on whether to remove the town’s police and fire chiefs from the state’s Civil Service system. Ultimately, the article was amended, and a real vote was postponed in favor of creating a Civil Service Study Committee to research and make a recommendation at the next Town Meeting, which is expected to be in September.
The committee of five voting members includes one member appointed jointly by the police and fire unions, Candace Delano; one member appointed by the Select Board, David Veira; and three members of Town Meeting appointed by the town moderator, Ralph Edwards, Heather Roman, and Thelma Young.
Veira’s appointment was not controversial in itself, with Select Board members voting to accept him as their appointee. However, the process in which he was chosen raised debate among Select Board members.
Julie DeLillo, who is acting as town administrator while Sean Fitzgerald is on vacation, recommended Veira after receiving 10 responses from potential candidates, but Select Board members Polly Titcomb and Neal Duffy did not know how the recommendation process would happen.
“I want to clarify that I don’t have a problem with the town administrator making a recommendation. What I’m concerned about was that I didn’t know it was going to be the town administrator making a recommendation,” Titcomb said.
Titcomb and Duffy both said they supported the recommendation, but wish the process would have been more transparent. Select Board Chairman Peter Spellios said he appreciated “hearing concerns about process,” but having the town administrator make a recommendation using their “professional expertise” made more sense than having the Select Board “volunteers” just choose a candidate.
“I don’t in this instance agree with the concerns being expressed,” Spellios said. “…If people don’t want to vote tonight and people want more time, instead of just saying they wish they had more time but they’re not going to stop the process — that’s not good enough for me, to be honest with you. If we’re going to complain about process, and we’re going to say it out loud and say this is not OK, then let’s just take the time. Let’s slow it down and do it, and the moderator and the rest of them will just have to wait for this board.”
Titcomb said she didn’t appreciate Spellios’ comments and felt like they were “sarcastic and a little disingenuous.”
“I’m just saying I would have liked to know who was making the recommendation and have more than 24 hours (to see the recommendation before deliberating),” Titcomb said.
Massachusetts Civil Service is a state-administered system that handles the testing of job applicants and employees seeking promotion in towns that use the system. In Swampscott, both the police and fire departments use civil service. If the chiefs of those departments were removed from civil service, the town would no longer follow the system’s laws, which currently restrict the town to either hiring chiefs from within its current police and fire ranks, or hiring sitting chiefs in other communities.
Proponents of leaving Civil Service include Fitzgerald and both Police Chief Ron Madigan and Fire Chief Graham Archer. They say, by leaving the system, the town would be in control of its own hiring practices and could expand the pool of applicants during future hiring processes.
Opponents of the move, who wish to stay in Civil Service, include the Swampscott Firefighters Union, which has released a statement saying removing the chiefs would be the “first step in attempting to remove the entire departments from Civil Service.” The union also says Civil Service is more fair because it protects against nepotism by being state-run, and it encourages in-house veterans looking for promotion to the rank of chief.
