By Gary Washburn
Chicago Tribune
Copyright 2007 Chicago Tribune Company
CHICAGO — Mark Freudenthal passed up promotion opportunities with his company after being called last year to begin the process of landing a coveted job with the Chicago Fire Department.
After Tim Boyd made it into the hiring pipeline, he rented an apartment in Chicago to comply with the city’s residency requirement, preparing for his entry into the department’s training academy.
When Brian Scanlon passed his physical proficiency test and met other requirements in a screening process that stretched over most of 2006, he and his wife sold their house in Bolingbrook and bought one in Chicago.
Though none of the three men has received official notification, they are in a group of candidates who will never realize dreams of becoming Chicago firefighters.
Freudenthal, Boyd and Scanlon were among the last names on a 1995 Fire Department hiring list to be called for processing, but the department now has decided instead to begin hiring applicants who passed a 2006 entrance test given about the time the three men were taking physicals and drug tests and undergoing background checks.
“I think they owe us at least a shot at this job,” said John Clemens, 40, another candidate from the 1995 list who was well along in the screening process. “At the very least, they owe us an explanation.”
But there will be no job offer, no explanation or official notification, Fire Department spokesman Larry Langford said.
“The legal requirement is not there,” he said. “There is an expense involved in that, and if you are aware the new list is in and people are starting to be pulled from the new list, you can make the deduction you are not going to be called.”
Nearly 17,000 prospective firefighters who passed the 1995 test remained on the department’s hiring list when Mayor Richard Daley approved plans to replace what, by then, was an aging employment pool with candidates who passed a new test in May 2006.
A legal challenge in the early 1980s wiped out a long-standing city hiring age limit , but by 1997, changes in federal and state laws made age restrictions possible once again for public safety departments. With Daley’s backing, the City Council in 2000 set a hiring age limit of 34 for firefighters, later increasing it to 37, but the new standard could be applied beginning only with the next hiring exam.
Candidates from the 1995 list were summoned for processing last year to ensure adequate staffing in case legal or other problems delayed use of the 2006 list, Langford said.
“If we don’t have people in the pipeline waiting to go into the academy, we end up having to spend millions of dollars in overtime,” he said. “You always ‘overbook’ a little bit.”
The department was clear with the candidates that there was no guarantee of employment, Langford said.
Nearly 300 prospective firefighters were in various stages of screening when the switch was made to the newer hiring list several weeks ago, Langford said. Full processing costs about $475 per person, in addition to fees paid to the Illinois State Police for background check assistance, he said.
Candidates from the class of ’95 said they made periodic inquiries about their status after their processing stopped last fall, but without success.
“I’d say over a dozen times, I was told, ‘We don’t know what’s going on,’ ” said Clemens, who works in the administrative offices of the Illinois Institute of Technology.
“The lack of information [has been] killing me and many others,” said Scanlon, 32, an information technology specialist.
Clemens, Scanlon and others learned their probable fate from recent newspaper stories that reported the Fire Department was seeking 500 new prospects for the academy from the 2006 list.
“You jump through all the hoops, and they drop you like a hot potato,” Scanlon said. “It takes an emotional toll.”