LIMA — Lima Mayor Dave Berger reiterated his stance during the mayor’s weekly press conference concerning the city’s civil service hiring process: “Get something done.”
During Monday’s council meeting, city councilors were given a letter from the mayor asking that the civil service board “immediately adopt a simple pass/fail rule to establish qualified candidates.”
“For year, we used the “rule of three,”” Berger said. “This meant for every spot we had open, we could interview three people for each open position. In 2012, it became the “rule of 10.” This means you have a majority of the people that felt like they wasted their time because they didn’t even get an interview.”
Through that system, only the top scorers were selected to be interviewed.
The rules were revisited because of complaints about the hiring of minorities for civil service jobs. Berger said many things have been tried with “limited, frustrating results.”
“We now know what the results have been with the rule of three and the rule of 10,” Berger said. “No one is satisfied with those results from the perspective of needing to change the city’s workforce to better reflect the demographic composition of the city of Lima.”
At the regular council meeting Monday, councilman Jesse Lowe responded to Mayor David Berger’s letter to council members concerning the hiring practices of the city and practices of the Civil Service Board. Lowe chairs the Humane Resources Committee, which is reviewing the hiring practice. Lowe said the mayor’s comments were a “slap in the face” to the committee and the Civil Service Board and he felt Berger’s comments were an attempt to discredit him rather than to address the lack of minority candidates. Berger was away at a mayor’s conference in California during the meeting.
Berger has argued that the use of civil service test scores to determine the most qualified candidates was a mistaken view of the test’s purpose and outcomes. He said the test was to merely establish qualified candidates and that it was impossible to determine who is the best candidate from a single written tests.
Lowe argues that the current hiring method is acceptable and that problems with hiring minorities lie elsewhere.
Berger asked residents to contact councilors and civil service committee members to urge them to act swiftly.
“This is not difficult,” Berger said. “They can do this quickly.”
