Rice to investigate Civil Service

Nassau County District Attorney Kathleen Rice announced Wednesday that her office will conduct an investigation into possible criminal activity by members of the Long Beach Civil Service Commission after a state report identified numerous mistakes in its operations.

“The people of Long Beach deserve better than this,” Rice said in a statement.

According to a review the state made public last week, the city’s payroll certification process received a score of 0 on a 100-point scale, the administrative process of appointments scored 26 and both failed to comply with civil service laws and regulations.

“The people of Long Beach have no assurance that their public employees are being hired, promoted and paid on the basis of merit and fitness as state law has required for 126 years,” state CSC President Nancy Groenwegen said in a statement.

The review reported that the city CSC failed to provide basic records and documents about its appointment process, making it impossible to determine whether employees are qualified for their positions or receive salaries commensurate with their job titles according to civil service law. Employees’ work histories, the review read, are “deficient in that they are not up-to-date, do not contain accurate transaction information, nor refer to source documents to substantiate each transaction.”

David Ernst, public information director for the state CSC, said of the findings, “There is no possibility of doing a meaningful payroll certification unless you have the documentation that tells you employee A is in the position that he is in legally and was appointed according to civil service laws and rules, and that they’re therefore entitled to the salary that they’re about to draw.”

Further, the Long Beach CSC failed to show whether any action was taken when employees were overpaid based on the assigned salary grade for their position, according to the review. It cited one instance in which an employee resigned in October 2008 but reappeared on the payroll a year later, though no documents showed that the CSC reviewed the employee’s return to the payroll.

The state commission’s new review is an update of previous reports, and is based in part on the work of a state team that visited Long Beach in January to take a fresh look at the CSC.

In 2004, the state released an audit report that gave the city a rating of “poor” for improperly classifying employment positions and titles, and offered 16 recommendations on how Long Beach could improve its system.

In February 2009, the state requested that the commission provide a timeline and a comprehensive plan for implementing 27 corrective actions in order to fix the city’s Civil Service system, including three key recommendations made in the original report: properly certifying the city payroll, getting roster information into good shape and ordering all provisional employees to take exams.

The new review recommended that the city CSC submit its timeline of compliance by May 1, and said it has until Dec. 31 to implement all of the recommendations, Ernst said.

“I’m pleased that we have such a comprehensive road map to assist us in our total compliance with the law and regulations,” said City Manager Charles Theofan, “and I think it’s going to be an extremely helpful document, something that we never have had anything quite like this in the past.”

In response, Ernst said that the state agency has always made itself readily available to Long Beach for technical assistance and has met several times with the city’s commission, and that its secretary attended an annual training session on civil service law and procedures last fall. “If Mr. Theofan is suggesting that there wasn’t sufficient information available to Long Beach to implement those corrective actions,” Ernst said, “we would certainly differ with that. They knew very well what needed to be done, and it wasn’t done.”

Asked about the score of zero for the city’s payroll certification program, one of the commission’s primary tasks, Theofan said, “That’s because it hasn’t been certified this year, but it was certified last year and I anticipate it will be certified again this year.”

Ernst said that what the city presented to the state last year as evidence of a certification “did not jibe with our definition of a certification by any means,” noting that the commission failed to submit a properly certified payroll.

Calling the charges against the city CSC “not that uncommon” among municipalities, Theofan said the city wants to look forward. “You never will have a full appreciation of how archaic things were back in 2004, when we first started to try to correct these actions,” he said. “... But we want to look ahead now, and the corrective actions look like they’re pretty manageable to follow.”

According to the state, the Long Beach CSC oversees more than 1,000 Civil Service employees, 477 employed by the city, 576 by the school district and 33 by the Housing Authority as well as an undetermined number of library workers, according to 2008 work force data.

Groenwegen has recommend that Long Beach “seriously consider” handing its three-member Civil Service operations over to the Nassau County Civil Service Commission.

Long Beach residents, Rice said in her statement, “deserve to know that their tax dollars are going to qualified civil servants, and that the agency entrusted with that responsibility is complying with the law. My office will work to ensure that trust is restored.”

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