Judge Pushes FDNY to Fix Hiring Process

LARRY NEUMEISTER
Associated Press Writer

NEW YORK - Portraying the city's response to his earlier orders as all but hopeless, a federal judge appointed former Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau as a special master to help force the city to improve the hiring of black and Hispanic firefighters.

U.S. District Judge Nicholas Garaufis on Wednesday made clear he was upset with the city's reaction so far to his January finding that the city had intentionally discriminated against blacks and Hispanics who applied to work as firefighters.

He said "swift and rigorous" implementation of compliance with his orders had been delayed in part by the "city's chronic - now bordering on recalcitrant - failure to fulfill its court-ordered obligations in a timely manner."

Morgenthau will have authority to monitor and investigate the city's compliance with the judge's orders. He will also oversee the development of a new procedure for screening and selecting applicants to be firefighters.

On Dec. 31, the 90-year-old Morgenthau left his position as district attorney, a job he had held since 1974. His successor, fellow Democrat Cyrus R. Vance Jr., was elected in November.

Garaufis said he had "no intention of letting the city backslide into its previous unlawful practices as it did" when another judge issued what he called a nearly identical ruling in the 1970s.

"For whatever reason - inertia, resource-allocation, or calculated strategy - the city has been dragging its feet throughout the remedial phase," the judge said. "The city does not appear to understand that it already lost this case, and that its obligation now is not to fight tooth and nail against the possibility of change, but to move with alacrity to cure its illegal practices. Put bluntly, the constitutional rights of thousands of its citizens are at stake," he said.

City law office spokeswoman Kate O'Brien Ahlers said: "This is a lengthy order in a very complex case, and we're reviewing it now."

The New York Fire Department has about 350 black firefighters out of 11,500 total. In January, Garaufis noted that blacks and Hispanics comprise 10 percent of the fire department's work force even though most city residents are minorities.

His findings agreed with the U.S. Department of Justice and a black firefighters fraternal group in finding that disparities among those taking recruitment exams in 1999 and 2002 were so wide that no trial was needed to rule against the city.

"These numbers stand in stark contrast to some of the nation's other large cities, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia and Houston, where minority firefighters have been represented in significantly higher percentages," the judge wrote in January.

On Wednesday, Garaufis wrote that he had recently learned that the city had not yet taken the preliminary step of retaining an expert to help it revise its firefighter test and did not expect to do so before October.

He said the city was claiming any contract proposal must pass through a "Byzantine hierarchy of bureaucratic review" before approval even though it managed to obtain "emergency" approval of an expert in eight days in 2006 when it learned it needed one to fight the lawsuit.

"This court cannot pore over the city charter, untangle the city's administrative hierarchy and hold hearing after hearing each time the city invokes some wrinkle of local governance to postpone the imposition of a remedy," the judge wrote.

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