NORWALK, Conn. – No one in the Norwalk Fire Department wants to see unqualified people get hired to be firefighters, Fire Chief Denis McCarthy said Wednesday.
There is no plan to reduce the requirements, Mayor Harry Rilling said.
McCarthy and Rilling were responding to Tim Lyons, who said he is a former firefighter, at the Mayor’s Night Out held in the City Hall community room. “This is people’s lives at stake,” Lyons said. “You don’t want to lessen requirements to make other people happy. You need the very best you’ve got out there.”
Lyons said he had never come to a meeting or written a letter to the editor before, but the proposed hiring changes aimed at diversification is “bothering me quite a bit.” He said he comes from a family of firefighters “in the busiest firehouses in the world in the ’60s and ’70s,” in South Bronx’ Fort Apache, “if you remember that.” You don’t find out if someone is a poor firefighter until someone dies, he said.
The Norwalk Fire Commission recently declined to renew McCarthy’s contract, leaving the door open to a new deal if concerns are addressed. It’s widely believed that the concerns relate to the low number of minorities being hired as firefighters. McCarthy, at the last Fire Commission meeting, announced that the written test would be given less of a priority in hiring than it has been given in the past.
McCarthy said the New Haven Fire Department had done that and had been very satisfied with the results. The Norwalk Fire Department’s practice of only giving interviews to people who score a 92 or better on the written exam has unfairly given an advantage to those who are college educated, he said. On Wednesday, he said, the practice put a “significant emphasis on education and not what is in someone’s heart and not what is in someone’s ability to do the back-breaking dangerous work that they do.”
“I don’t know very many companies that hire based on an intelligence exam, but the fire companies have been doing that,” McCarthy said.
“Standards are going to be maintained. There is not one person in the fire department that wants to reduce standards,” Rilling said.
“I agree with the notion that firefighter safety and the public safety demands an extremely well-qualified fire department,” McCarthy said, going on to explain that he never wants the fire department to be “just good enough.”
“We put a lot of responsibility on our officers, and their primary duty, and I say this at every promotion and every swearing in of a new employee, their primary duty is to make sure that everyone who works under their command is safe and is able to go home every day,” McCarthy said. “I take that as a sacred responsibility as chief of the department. So I am not going to participate in a process that is going to lower the standard, that places firefighters at risk.”
But, “If we are going to be the very best fire department that we possibly can then we need more diversity on the Norwalk Fire Department and I have to find a method that allows us to achieve that,” McCarthy said. “If we are serving the entire community … there is more to the work that we do than running into a burning building and carrying someone out.”
Ethnicity should not be part of the testing, Lyons replied. “I don’t care if you’re green, blue, whatever, you’ve got to be the best qualified,” he said.
The goals of increasing diversity and having the best fire department are “not mutually exclusive,” McCarthy said.
Literally 1,000 people take the test, McCarthy said. The goal has been to whittle that down to 50 candidates for an oral interview, but that will change when all they have to do is pass the exam with a score of 70, he said.
That’s because, “A 91 percent should not be a failure. Right now a 91 percent on the written exam, by all accounts, it comes down to being a failure because you never get to an interview,” he said.
But now, “Anybody who gets less than a 92, a 92 on the intelligence exam, they fail,” he said. “Those that see it as a vocation, that want to deliver a public service, that want to help their neighbors, that come from the community, will have the opportunity to represent that in an interview.”
Rilling said there will be no favoritism, and had experience from his 17 years as Norwalk police chief to share.
“We lost a lot of candidates who went to other departments and turned out to be exceptionally good candidates, because they didn’t get on the department because they got an 89 on the exam when somebody else got a 90,” Rilling said. “…. The academic score, the written test, is not the only indicator of a good firefighter or a good police officer or a good anything. You have to give people an opportunity to go through the process and then pick the very best from that process.”
“I’m skeptical with interviews. I don’t know whose doing it, what their leanings are,” Lyons said.
Rilling suggested he meet with McCarthy one on one, or go to a Fire Commission meeting. “If you’re skeptical with the tests I don’t think there’s anything that we’re going to say tonight that’s going to change your mind,” Rilling said. “If you don’t have confidence in the chief and in me and in the Fire Commission and in the process, then we’re not going to change your mind tonight.”
The goal is simply to increase the pool of prospective firefighters, he said. It’s thought that there will then be more minority applicants.
“There’s not one firefighter that will ever stand by silently, and the union is on board with this, they’re not going to stand by silently while they think that we are reducing the standards,” Rilling said. “I am telling you tonight that we are not reducing the standards, we are looking at a process that will be more fair for everybody.”
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