CAMBRIDGE FIREFIGHTERS UNION LOCAL 30, INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF FI rERS June 22, 2020 Mr. Manager: This letter serves as official notification that Local 30 is boycotting the City’s Sole Assessment Center to fill the position of Fire Chief. The City is insisting on using an unproven, process without, good faith or basic due diligence in ensuring the process will not be abused to favor one or more candidates. We have been discussing the position of Fire Chief, and the process by which the position should be filled, for several years. As you know, the City deviated from longstanding practice when it declined to participate in a Civil Service examination prior to Chief Reardon's retirement in March of 2017. The City made this decision despite knowing that it would result in a vacancy at the head of a public safety department in one of the Commonwealth's largest cities, and without any formal promotional process to fill that vacancy. When the inevitable vacancy occurred, the City deliberately chose an Acting Chief without any formal process or evaluation. It is precisely because of the City's deliberate actions and inactions that the Fire Department has been commanded for more than three years by a provisional Chief appointed through a highly subjective process. In 2019, the City unilaterally decided to change the process by which the Fire Chief is selected, and entered a Delegation Agreement with the Massachusetts Human Resources Division to fil the position via a Sole Assessment Center. The City deliberately withheld this information from the Local for several months, waiting to notify us until we had agreed on a successor contract. During impact bargaining sessions regarding the City's unilateral decision, Local 30 repeatedly voiced our concems that the City had not performed due diligence to evaluate how Sole Assessment Centers worked, whether they provided a superior means of evaluating a candidate, how those evaluations would be conducted, how the process could be as objective as practicable, and how that objectivity could be verified by both candidates and the members of the Cambridge Fire Department whom the person selected would lead The City’s representatives displayed a stunning ignorance about all aspects of Assessment Centers, including methods of evaluation, potential benefits and drawbacks of various processes, and how evaluators would be selected and trained. They repeatedly waved away P.0, BOX 400818 CAMBRIDGE, MA. 02140-0009 =Local 30's suggestions for improving transparency and objectivity, and our concerns that the City’s proposed process was wildly subjective and ripe for abuse. During the impact bargaining session on August 29, 2019, we believe we discovered why the City was so dismissive of our concerns. When asked directly, “Do you agree with Local 30's position that the incumbent Acting Chief should not have any advantage in the Assessment Center process,” the City replied that they did not agree, and thought that the Acting Chief should have an advantage because of his experience in the position. We pointed out that the Acting Chief attained that position without an open competitive process, at the sole discretion of the City, and was now being given an additional advantage. This is unequivocally unfair, and a textbook case of favoritism that makes a mockery of the City's pretensions of being an equitable workplace. (The City's representatives attempted to walk back this endorsement of incumbency advantage at the following meeting.) The City has neglected its duty to provide steady leadership for a department charged with ensuring the safety of the public, and refused to honestly engage with the labor union charged with both protecting the public and advocating for the safety and well-being of its Members. As we have pointed out on many occasions, the principal reason that the promotional process is so important to Local 30 is that the Fire Chief is ultimately responsible for determining how we operate in extremely unsafe conditions which could result in serious injury or death to firefighters or the public. We cannot abide the installation of a candidate through such a flawed and illegitimate process, particularly when Civil Service is providing an acceptable alternative in October. ‘As such, twelve of the thirteen Deputy Chiefs have agreed to boycott the Sole Assessment Center process, including all eight Division Deputies, and the Deputies in charge of Emergency Preparedness and Coordination, Fire Prevention, Special Operations and Safety, and Emergency Medical Services. If the City decides to proceed with this fatally flawed process, Local 30 will immediately call for a Vote of No Confidence in whoever is named to the position. Respectfully, Cambridge Firefighters Union Local 30, International Association of Fire Fighters Khe Chris Haynes, President Deputy Chiefs John Cotter Brian Gover Kenneth Jenness Robert Walsh Mark Cunningham Patrick Haggerty Edward Morrissey Jr. Sean White Peter Donovan Frederick Ikels Michael Morrissey Raymond Vaillancourt