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Mayor Toni Harp has named a new director as of Monday of the city’s emergency 911 call center: firefighter Michael Briscoe. Her administration also agreed to pay him $285,000 to settle a lawsuit he was losing.
Even before Briscoe (pictured) started the job Monday, the head of the fire union questioned the appointment’s legality.
Briscoe will oversee the city’s public safety communications department, sometimes to referred to as PSAP (for “public safety answering point”).
It’s a high-pressure department at the front lines of daily crisis in New Haven. The department’s 55 staffers handled around 129,000 911 calls last year.
The department handles 911 calls jointly for the fire and police departments. It is currently housed on the fourth floor of the police department’s 1 Union Ave. headquarters. There has been some talk of relocating the office elsewhere in the city.
Briscoe has been pushing for a promotion for a decade — a different kind of promotion. He sued the city after failing to get a promotion to lieutenant based on a 2003 exam, one of a series of controversies involving alleged racial discrimination in the fire department’s testing process. Read about his case here and here.
David Rosen, Briscoe’s attorney, said Friday that both sides agreed it made sense to settle the case once Harp offered Briscoe the promotion. He said the city agreed to pay Briscoe $285,000 to drop the suit. He said the city’s insurance company will cover the cost of the suit.
Rosen defended the settlement “a very small fraction of the city’s exposure had the case dragged on, considering five years and counting of attorney’s fees and 10 years and counting in back pay.”
Mayoral spokesman Laurence Grotheer confirmed that insurance will cover the settlement. “It’s not public funds,” he said.
Legal?
Firefighters union President Jimmy Kottage attacked the appointment.
“Mike deserves every benefit that every other firefighter gets,” Kottage said. But he objected to the way the administration made the appointment — under a provision that allows the mayor to transfer a bargaining-unit member to another “similar” position without union approval. Briscoe will technically be considered a firefighter, Kottage said.
“There’s two problems I have with the whole issue. Is it a charter violation? Because the job is not similar in nature. And two: Did they do direct dealing with Mike? Because the union will still be representing Michael. I need to protect him. The city has no right dealing with Briscoe without contacting his union representation.”
Reached Friday afternoon, Grotheer said he had no available information for an immediate comment.
As for the $285,000 lawsuit settlement, Kottage remarked, “that’s not bad for a case that they lost” in preliminary court decisions.
Big Job Ahead
The public safety department has been without a director since October, when Clayton Northgraves resigned the post. George Peet, the deputy director, has run the department on an acting basis in the meantime.
Ron Hobson, president of AFSCME Local 884, which represents the department’s workers, welcomed the hiring of a new director.
“We need somebody in that room to get it back under control,” Hobson said Friday. “I’ve been in that room for 26 years. We’ve never had problems as severe as this. There’s low morale. Supervisors don’t care.”
The department’s temporary top bosses have done “the best they can” given the challenges there, Hobson said. “But when the chips are down, you have supervisors that don’t really supervise. They never should have become supervisors, because there were discipline problems when they got hired. We need someone in there to get some organization back in that room.” A couple of recent episodes have “come close” to coworkers “assaulting each other,” he said. “That place is totally out of control.”
Police Union President Louis Cavaliere Jr., meanwhile, renewed his call to have a police sergeant in the room, as well.
“We’ve been fighting to put someone back up there from our rank and file. A sergeant. The chief agreed. So far it’s fallen on deaf ears” from City Hall, Cavaliere said. “The city wants it all civilianized. We told them it’s not a good idea. That it won’t work. We’ve had a lot of complaints officers about civilians not taking them serious.”
New Fire Chief Allyn Wright said Friday that he’s “glad that the position is being filled and looking forward to improving the overall operations of the communication center.”