State prepping new civil-service exam for March
Judge mulling firefighters' demand to hold test Saturday
The state is shooting for a March civil-service exam in place of the one previously scheduled this weekend, Human Resources Division lawyers told a judge in a hearing.
HRD “has already retained a consultant to begin to go through an evaluation of the professional requirements and to create new questions based on the same reading material,” attorney Samuel Furgang told the court during a hearing on Wednesday. State attorneys added that the consultants say this will be available in late March, a timeline HRD said it intends to stick to.
As of press time, Suffolk Superior Judge Christopher Belezos continued to mull several Boston firefighters’ class-action lawsuit seeking a preliminary injunction to compel the state to hold a district fire chiefs promotional exam as originally scheduled this Saturday.
The state scrapped that test after Judge Douglas Wilkins’ ruling last month that the civil-service police sergeants promotional exam used by various cities and towns, including Boston, had disadvantaged Black and Hispanic testtakers. That caused an uproar from the firefighters who had been long studying to take this test, and Boston City Hall, which sent a letter opposing the cancelation.
“On its face the Tatum case has no applicability to firefighters,” Leah Barrault, the firefighters’ attorney and a familiar face in the past year’s jake-centric labor disputes, said, referring to the police sergeants case.
Barrault essentially argued that there would be no harm done by just ordering the test to happen, letting a potential Civil Service Commission investigation play out and then either keeping or scrapping the exam results pending the findings. That would mean, she said, that if the test is found to not be discriminatory, there’s a list to go right away rather than waiting for the rejiggered March test.
“They have to show sound and sufficient reasons” to change the date of a noticed and scheduled test, Barrault, of Barrault and Associates, said. “There is going to be irreparable harm if this exam is not held Saturday the 19th.”
She’ll be making similar arguments to the commission Thursday morning as to why they should investigate the case, a process she said would take about a month or two.
The judge appeared skeptical of her legal arguments, countering that in order for the courts to jump in and compel the defendants to do something, the burden’s on the plaintiffs to demonstrate that it causes her clients irreparable harm, not just that it’s the more convenient option.
“Neither side has presented anything to me in terms of witnesses or statistics or documentation to support whether either side is going to succeed down the road,” Belezos said.
Furgang, the attorney representing HRD, insisted the cancelation was the right move because the format — if not the questions — of the sergeants exam and the fire promotional ones are essentially the same. The new test, he said, will follow the “roadmap” laid out in the lengthy ruling in the sergeants’ case.
“HRD believes very strongly in light of the scathing decision issued by Justice Wilkins that we have to change course, and we don’t want to be put in a position to be compelled to give an exam” that will “lead us down the wrong course,” Furgang said.
He added that the state intends to appeal any decisions from the courts or Civil Service Commission to hold the test this weekend because they do not intend to use the results. “Those results, we believe, are inherently defective.”