Dearborn Debates Purpose, Necessity of Civil Service System

On Nov. 8, Dearborn residents will be asked to vote on a measure that will essentially abolish the city’s civil service system–a set of guidelines and governing commission meant to oversee city employee matters, including hiring, promotions and rate of pay.

City officials have said that the commission is redundant, duplicating the protections provided by unions. Some residents, however, believe that eliminating the civil service commission would open the door for cronyism, political patronage, and possible lawsuits.

The U.S. Civil Service Commission dates back to 1883, when the national Civil Service Reform Act was passed into law. According to City Attorney Debra Walling, Dearborn’s commission was originally created in 1938 to oversee hiring for the Dearborn Fire Department. In 1942, it was approved for the whole city.

“The civil service commission was used to develop work rules and policies that affected city employees,” Walling explained at the Oct. 4 candidates forum conducted by the League of Women Voters – Dearborn and Dearborn Heights.

But now, the city has eight labor unions that cover almost all full-time employees, Walling said, “and they take precedence over the civil service commission.”

However, Human Resources Director Valerie Murphy-Goodrich, who reports to the five-person commission, claims that there are clear issues covered by the civil service system not addressed by union contracts.

“The union contracts do not contain rules relating to hiring,” she said. “Civil service rules do. So if the civil service system is eliminated, then there are no guidelines and rules to prevent political patronage.”

Moreover, Murphy-Goodrich added, the civil service system is seen by some as a “safety net” to protect city employees if and when collective bargaining laws are eroded–a distinct possibility, given recent legal changes for unions.

In Michigan, an effort to repeal Public Act 312, which bars police and fire unions from going on strike during a labor dispute, was . And in September, Gov. Rick Snyder signed into law a bill prohibiting minimum staffing mandates for cities that do not already have them.

But Dearborn officials maintain that elimination of the system would follow a statewide and nationwide trend of streamlining local government processes, making them more efficient in hopes of running leaner–although Mayor Jack O’Reilly admitted that the city doesn’t know how much money eliminating the system will save.

“We can’t quantify how much is spent on just civil service issues,” he said at the LWV forum, but added that it would likely speed up HR processes for the city.

And that promptness, said Citizens Research Council Director of Local Affairs Eric Lupher, is something generally applauded by city employees and department heads alike.

“Civil service systems have never been beloved either by management or by labor,” said Lupher, who came to the Oct. 4 forum to provide an unbiased history of civil service. “Management sees them as getting in the way with regulations or rules. Labor often sees them as management.”

Lupher and Walling both said that in their research, they couldn’t find many–if any–comparable cities in Michigan still using civil service commissions. Murphy-Goodrich, however, named off several–including Livonia, Westland, Royal Oak, Lansing and Dearborn Heights.

Most of the cities with a commission, she said, are like Dearborn in that they have a mayor who presides above city council, as opposed to cities with a less-prominent city manager.

“If you have the general population electing a mayor who serves as CEO, then the potential for that position to exercise political patronage exists,” she said. “And that’s the whole history and reason why civil service was instituted in the first place.”

Murphy-Goodrich also questions the timing of the ballot proposal, which comes just four years after the voter-approved revision of the Dearborn City Charter in 2007.

“If the Charter Commission felt that civil service should be eliminated, then they had the ability to vote at that time, when the charter was revised,” she said. “I don’t recall any discussion about reserving it as an issue that voters would need to vote on again.”

But Walling said that was exactly the charter’s intention–to have the elimination go before voters as a stand-alone issue.

If the measure is passed, ballot language also indicates that city council “could create a human resources commission by ordinance to oversee any employment issues.”

Walling said that the city intends to do so if the ballot proposal passes, but was required by the attorney general’s office to leave the language flexible, as the ordinance has not been drafted.

Also remaining to be seen is how elimination of the civil service system will affect Murphy-Goodrich, who reports to the commission and whose salary is also set by them. Walling said it’s not clear yet as to whether Murphy-Goodrich would be required to report to city council, or to the yet-to-be-created HR commission.

But all this comes after voters answer the question, said Lupher, of “whether civil service commissions have become antiquated.”