Tonight's Daily Times leads with a headline regarding a management request for an appropriation for recruiting money for the chief of police, fire chief and assessor. Why?
All that is necessary for the assessor's job is a couple of ads and we will be swamped with applicants for the job. The fire and police chiefs are another matter altogether. Yes, we took both jobs out of civil service last year but does that mean we are going to engage in the proverbial "nation wide search" for qualified applicants? If the answer is yes then my advice is save the money.
In the top public safety jobs, Burlington has never opened the position to outside applicants and as a resident I would offer a number of reasons why we shouldn't. Mostly those reasons revolve around loyalty and morale.
In both the fire department and the police department we have top command people who have been with us for decades. If they were no good as personnel then how on earth did we elevate them to positions of command?
What message do we send all along the command chain if we by pass people that we have had close proximity to in day to day operations of the departments and advertise for some person from the outside who we have no experience with and can only rely on recommendations from people we have no connection to?
That message is one of stagnation. When a top command position in a department opens up it results in a healthy competition for positions up and down the command chain. If you replace a chief with a captain then a captain is replaced with a lieutenant and a lieutenant is replaced with a sargent and a sargent is replaced with a patrolman. The same domino effect would take place in the fire department. If you choose fromn the outside, every position might be frozen for as much as a decade.
By hiring someone from the outside we are essentially saying to every person in both departments that we reject the idea that any of you are qualified to move up the chain of command. That is absolutely the wrong message.
In the police department, we have two captains who have served the community well for many years and they deserve a chance to move to the top spot. The same is true in the fire department. We are not some Podunk little community that needs Clint Eastwood to come in and show us how to run public safety. We have a large number of professionals trained within our own structure that know the community backward and forward and deserve a chance to move up in the command structure. This would not be some favorite son appointment but would be a healthy internal competition for advancement.
I see no reason to send any kind of message to our existing employees that management thinks they are not up to the task.
