On August 21, the Mayor's Office emailed the City Council with an update on firefighter hiring. Very encouragingly, the email stated that they would be changing course and hiring from the Civil Service Firefighter List to fill the vacancies created by the opening of the new Assembly Square fire station scheduled to open next year.

As I wrote about back in April, the Administration had announced this spring that they intended to use lateral hiring to fill these 12 new firefighter positions. They cited the heavy lift of interviewing 2N + 1 candidates (one applicant more than twice the number of positions, as required by Civil Service law) and the relatively short timeline for hiring these positions, with the new fire station slated to come online in February 2025.

After hearing strong opposition to this plan from Somerville Firefighters Local 76, my colleagues on the council and I vehemently disagreed with this decision and urged the Administration to have a re-think. Ward 1 Councilor Matt McLaughlin gave an extensive presentation on the background of Fire Civil Service hiring in Somerville and the issues in play here. And we seemed to be at a loggerheads until this update last week.

I want to thank the Administration for going back to the drawing board on this one and reversing that earlier decision. I know it's not enjoyable walking back a position taken publicly, and I didn't didn't call for them to do so lightly. While the Administration didn't take lateral hiring off the table entirely as an option should the list approach not work out, I'm really encouraged to see them going the list route here.

This is going to mean a very substantial amount of work for our Human Resources department, who will have to conduct 34 interviews for those 15 positions (three vacant plus the 12 new positions). But we have long list of seemingly very qualified Fire candidates from Somerville eager to serve the community and I believe the effort will prove worthwhile. And I'm thrilled for all those Somervillians who now stand to get a shot at becoming Somerville firefighters.