NYC, firefighter applicants' lawyers to weigh hiring plan

City officials and lawyers for black and Hispanic applicants to the FDNY will try next week to work out a quick fix so a few hundred new firefighters can be hired in the fall, according to court records and interviews.

The city's planned hire of 312 firefighters this month was put on hold when Brooklyn federal Judge Nicholas Garaufis ruled Wednesday that the written exam used to screen potential candidates failed to test for useful job skills and unlawfully excluded blacks and Hispanics.

Although Mayor Michael Bloomberg said on Friday the city was going to appeal Garaufis' ruling and couldn't hire firefighters "right now," City Hall lawyers and representatives of the Vulcan Society, which represents black and Hispanic firefighters, are scheduled to appear before the judge Wednesday to talk about hiring alternatives.

One method suggested by city lawyers is to begin randomly picking candidates to process for appointment to the fire academy from an initial list of approximately 20,000 who took the challenged test, court records show.

Under that option suggested by city attorneys, the exam scores would be used to winnow down a modified eligibility list of about 17,000 candidates. Then, some of the highest and lowest scores would be eliminated, according to court records. The random selection would then be made from a narrow band of candidates of up to 4,600 people, according to the city attorney's letter.

A second method would be to make random selection from the entire pool of 17,000 candidates, the letter stated. A spokesman for the Corporation Counsel's office couldn't elaborate on the proposed selection methods.

An FDNY spokesman said Friday that the department was down in strength by about 200 firefighters. The department's budgeted allocation for firefighters was about 8,600.

Richard Levy, a Manhattan attorney for the Vulcan Society, which was involved in the lawsuit brought by the Justice Department in 2007, said Wednesday's court conference would focus on how hiring could go forward in the short term, perhaps in the fall.

"If there can be some kind of agreement with the court, then using the current list of applicants, it could happen fairly quickly," Levy said.

But anything that happens won't come fast enough for Danny Figueroa, 24, of the Bronx, who qualified under the suspended exam and has wanted to be a firefighter since he was a child.

"Generally it is very frustrating," said Figueroa, who has qualified twice.

Two years ago, Figueroa said, a fiscal crunch led to a cancellation of one academy class, while the current lawsuit killed his chance of entering the academy on Aug. 30.

"Now you are going to tell me I have to start the entire process all over again?" he said.