PITTSFIELD, Mass. — The City Council will further review recommendations that the city replace Civil Service with an alternate system for its police and fire chiefs.

The council voted on Tuesday to have its Committee on Public Health and Safety take up an examination of a series of recommendations put forth this by a task force put together by the mayor.

The task force has been looking at the issues surrounding the role civil service in the appointment of public safety department heads over several months. 

"We did a lot of hard work, and we looked at a lot of issues," said Michael McCarthy, who served on the nine member committee. 

McCarthy said that the committee had ultimately been somewhat divided on the question of whether to remove the position of these chiefs from the civil service system, but had been unanimous on several key principles about their appointment, an issue which has proved controversial for the city for years.

While the task force voted 6-3 in favor of opting out of civil service, with representatives from the fire and police unions opposed, the committee was unanimous in stating that whatever method is used should be objective, transparent, and based in merit.

"Whether we come out of civil service or not, we want those principles to be included," McCarthy told the council.

The city has been without a duly appointed police or fire chief for a number of years, with the current heads of those departments serving as chiefs in an "acting" capacity, a source of concern for many in local government.

The issue sparked considerable debate among the committee who forged the city's new charter, who ultimately found it too big a question to be settled under their auspices, asking the mayor to assemble a special group to study the problem more thoroughly.

"The civil service system is well-intended, but it's broken," said Councilor Christopher Connell, who thanked the committee for providing some direction on how to proceed.

The council decided it was not yet ready to make a decision on the committee's recommendations, which were generated in May and forwarded to the council by Mayor Bianchi this week.

"The conclusion was that unfortunately civil service is a system that appears to be dying on the vine," said Bianchi, echoing contentions heard by experts throughout the committee's tenure, that the Depression-era bureaucracy was crumbling and in disarray.

Bianchi said the governor and legislature have allowed it to go under funded "because they know there's other options."

In the sole public commentary heard on the issue at Tuesday's council meeting, former School Committee member Terry Kinnas adamantly opposed removing the hiring of chiefs from the longtime evaluation system.

"The further we keep it away from political influence, the better off we are," said Kinnas.

Assistant City Solicitor Darren Lee said the recommended course of action is to hire a consultant to help draft a new ordinance that will set out the terms governing the selection of the heads of these departments.

The council voted unanimously to refer the matter to its Public Health and Safety Committee in order to hear more information and testimony on the proposed changes.

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