By JEFF LIPTON
But state officials disagree with the city's rosy assessment, and have given the commission 18 months to comply with the law. “They still have a lot of work to do,” said David Ernst, a spokesman for the state Civil Service Commission. “The end result has not been good. For the past five years, there have been many promises made but not much progress to show for it.”
In an audit report released in early 2004, the state CSC gave the city a “poor” rating for improperly classifying employment positions and titles. The agency reported that the city was administering the merit system “absent of sound administrative policies, practices and procedures.”
In the report, the state offered 16 recommendations on how Long Beach could improve its system. According to Ernst, the city has yet to implement three of the key recommendations, including properly certifying the city payroll, getting roster information into good shape and ordering all provisional employees to take exams.
“In 2004, when our audit was released, we thought that five years was acceptable in terms of fixing what was a very dysfunctional system,” said Ernst. “It should have been done in a much shorter period of time.”
City officials, however, said they have worked hard to overhaul the system. Jim Hennessy, a former City Council president who was appointed last year to head the commission, described its work as “obviously a step in the right direction.”
Hennessy said that when the current city administration arrived in 2004, it saw a system in total disarray. “It was completely out of control,” he said. “There was no compliance going on. People were hired and fired at will. This is definitely a reminder of how far we've come and that we are dedicated to the new [system]. It was so bad that it has taken us four years to fix it and to get to this point.”
The Long Beach CSC voted on Feb. 5 to certify the city's payroll, ensuring that all employees are qualified for their positions. Payroll certification also protects employees' rights under Civil Service law.
When the current administration took office in 2004, it worked to rectify an agency that was improperly installed and dysfunctional, city officials said. “We found hiring practices that were noncompliant and employees who maintained jobs for years without passing Civil Service exams,” said City Council President Thomas R. Sofield Jr. “It took our commitment to good government practices and four years of hard work to remedy the issues that had accumulated over the previous three decades.”
Even though the CSC required job candidates to take appropriate job exams within six months of being hired, many employees didn't take those exams for at least 10 years. Others had job titles changed after receiving low test scores, which kept them on the payroll. In addition, employment records were never updated, city officials said.
According to Hennessy, the commission was even continuing to pay health insurance premiums for employees who had died. “That's how bad the practices were,” he said. “There were people who held positions who were not qualified, which is in violation of the law.”
In addition to the city payroll, the Long Beach CSC is responsible for the payroll of the school district, the housing authority and the public library.
City officials met with state CSC officials last month to review what still needs to be done for the city to be in full compliance. The state suggested that Long Beach consider joining the Nassau County CSC, which has 46,000 members, compared with fewer than 1,000 in Long Beach.
Ernst said the state has received complaints about the city CSC and is taking them very seriously. In a Feb. 12 letter to Joseph Conboy, president of the state commission, a longtime Long Beach employee, who did not identify himself, called the recent certification by the city “an act of pure corruption.”
Ernst said that if the city fails to bring the agency into compliance within 18 months, the state has the authority to remove commission members who do not follow the law.
Hennessy said it is odd that the city was not informed of any specific problems with its certification procedures. “We are trying hard to be certified, but we are being told we are not up to [state] standards or expectations,” he said. “We want to be held accountable.” As a result, he said, the state and city discussed specific benchmarks that Long Beach must meet, along with providing the state with periodic progress reports.
Hennessy said he agrees that not much was accomplished in the four years before he took over the commission last September. “We got more done in the past five months than what was done in the previous four years,” he said.
He added that the city was not in compliance with only one of the 16 state recommendations. “This is our first time out of the box after 30 years [of non-compliance],” Hennessy said. “That's not bad.”
He said that the letter to Conboy was written by “a former employee who was disgruntled,” and that he was fired and has “an ax to grind” with the city administration. Hennessy said he places no merit in the anonymous letter.
The city CSC would rather remain independent of the county, keeping the agency under local control, he said. “This is a work in progress,” Hennessy said. “This is an ongoing process. That's why we agreed to meet certain benchmarks and present periodic progress reports.”
Comments about this story? JLipton@liherald.com or (516) 569-4000 ext. 213.
