Columbus City Council members voted 7-0 to approve a resolution that rejects the establishment of a merit system for the city’s police and fire departments.
Resolutions only have to be voted on once to be approved or denied. Council members Jerone Wood, D-District 3, and Jay Foyst, R-District 6, were absent.
Executive Director of Administration Eric Frey said the merit board would consist of five members, who would “then be authorized to deal with all of the hiring and promotions for any of the employees that fall under their purview.”
House Enrolled Act 1016, passed in 2023, says that departments with at least 12 full-time staff serving areas of at least 20,000 must adopt a merit board by 2025, unless a municipality’s city council adopts a resolution before the end of the year rejecting the establishment of a merit system.
“The request in the resolution is to basically defer that to police and fire,” Frey told council members.
Now that the resolution has been passed, it will now be voted on by active full-time CPD and CFD members.
The merit board would be a commission of five members, two of those appointed by the mayor of different political parties, one by city council and then two more of different political parties elected by active Columbus police officers and firefighters.
Council President Frank Miller, R-District 4, asked what the timeline would be for service members to take a vote on a merit system — Frey said it would have to be before the end of the year or the merit system would automatically be enacted in 2025, adding that the fire department in particular already has something in place to do a member-wide vote through their pension board.
Council member Josh Burnett, R-at-large, said members had heard during city budget deliberations, which began this week, how much hiring at the departments has evolved over the decades.
“As we were talking about police and fire today during the budget, they talked about— Chief (Steve) Norman, as well as Chief (Andy) Lay— that 30 years ago, the hiring process looked this way and these amounts of numbers were there,” Burnett said on Tuesday night. “And we’ve seen over those 30 years, a lot of changes, and I think that putting up any barriers to our police and fire doing what they do, I would not be in favor of.”
