'Eyebrow-raising' proposed charter changes could chuck objectivity in city hiring |Opinion

Vladimir Kogan is an associate professor of political science at the Ohio State University. His research focuses on state and local politics and policy.

Columbus voters may be asked this November to approve changes to the city charter that would fundamentally change how public employees are hired and promoted.

If approved, the changes would largely eliminate requirements that employment decisions be made on the basis of objective, pre-defined performance measures — assessed through competitive and transparent exams — and greatly increase the scope for political considerations and patronage politics in the process.

More: Are competitive test scores, cornerstone of Columbus civil service hiring, on the way out?

No concrete data to support  claims

These changes would be concerning if they had gone through a full and detailed vetting process, but are even more eyebrow-raising given the unusual efforts by Columbus Mayor Andrew Ginther to push them through with minimal deliberation or debate.

For example, as Dispatch reporter Bill Bush uncovered, the mayor’s staff specifically bypassed the city’s Civil Service Commission in developing the proposal. In recent weeks, the commission’s executive director, Amy DeLong — hired by the mayor — has offered a changing mix of rationalizations to justify it.

Most recently, DeLong argued that reliance on testing to fill positions reduces diversity but admitted she had no concrete data to support this claim, an odd way to justify a potentially monumental change.

The way the proposal is being sold to both city council and the public is incomplete at best and disingenuous at worst, so it is important to understand both how it would change the current practices and the potential unintended (or perhaps intended) consequences.

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Testing misrepresented

City leaders have subtly misrepresented how the current hiring process works in practice, particularly for new police officers and firefighters. Both groups of applicants must currently take a multiple-choice test and an oral exam.

Police officers also complete a writing test — an important consideration for a job where writing reports that are later used in court is a central responsibility — while firefighters complete a set of physical challenges.

More: Charter Review Commission sends final recommendations to City Council

Crucially, every part of this process except the oral exam is already graded on a pass-fail basis, as would be the case under the proposed charter reforms. The only thing that would change is the oral exam, on which applicants currently receive a numerical score that determines each applicant’s relative ranking on hiring lists.

In an analysis completed while serving on the mayor’s Community Safety Advisory Commission, I found no evidence that minority applicants did worse on the oral police exam.

In fact, I found that female applicants actually scored better than their male counterparts. So the claim that changing the oral exam to a pass-fail format will increase diversity is not at all supported by the data.

Unlike these entry-level positions, multiple-choice exams do play a larger role in promotions. But those tests focus on legal requirement, labor contract provisions, city policies, and department operating procedures — precisely the knowledge essential for good supervisors.

Some have argued that the current process rewards the best test-takers, not the best employees. But this is true only if the current test fails to measure skills that predict job performance — an empirical question on which the city has offered no evidence. And the solution would be to create tests that measures skills we care about, not eliminate testing altogether.

Corrupting the process

Finally, we have to recognize that the proposed solution may be worse than the limitations of the current tests. Without numerical scores to constrain hiring decisions, politically, appointees would have far greater scope to prioritize political considerations and potentially use city jobs as patronage to reward narrow interests.

Given the various corruption and influence-peddling controversies in city government in recent years — from the conviction of a former Democratic lobbyist on bribery charges to backroom dealing in road redesign and freeway off-ramps decisions — this is far from a theoretical concern.

City government exists to provide essential services to Columbus residents.

This requires filling city jobs on the basis of competence and expertise. With the proposed charter changes, we risk creating a system where jobs are instead allocated and employees promoted on the basis of who people know and their political allegiances — hardly an improvement.

Vladimir Kogan is an associate professor of political science at the Ohio State University. His research focuses on state and local politics and policy.

This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Vladimir Kogan: Charter proposal will make how Columbus hires for worse