Du Quoin Drafting Hiring Policy

</element><element id="paragraph-1" type="body"><![CDATA[Two Du Quoin city council members Monday broached the subject of a city hiring policy that could include this "silver bullet": If the city hires one of the council members' immediate family members into a key city employment position, that commissioner has to resign from the council as a matter of conflict of interest.

Finance commissioner Rex Duncan and water commissioner Yvonne Spencer said they have "agreed to disagree" on how far a proposed city hiring policy should go. Mayor John Rednour and other council members chimed in that good public policy is important to the city of Du Quoin, but not at the expense of losing of good council members.

Both Duncan and Spencer admit this is a work in progress, and said their discussions ultimately lead to putting city administrator Blaine Bastien in charge of filling most of the positions in the city.

Positions in the police and fire departments are filled by an independent police and fire merit board.

"The goal is to clearly state our philosophy behind recruitment is to hire the ver best people--period," said Duncan. "We want to place this process with the city administrator and advertise the positions. We are getting between 100 and 150 applications for each job we post," he said. We want every candidate to know they are getting fair and reasonable consideration," said Duncan.

"It provides protection agains nepotism and conflict of interest," said Duncan.

"There are points we disagree on," said Duncan of his recent discussions with commissioner Yvonne Spencer. But they are friendly with the same goal.

Duncan went so far as to tell council members that he felt if a well-qualified immediate family member of a seated councilman or council woman is selected to a position the family has to make the decision as to whether the applicant should accept the position at the cost of the council member resigning.

"There's a death penalty in this," said Duncan.

Council members then began chiming in that this kind of issue very seldom comes up, but if it does the city stands a chance of losing a very capable council member. Some council members said that if the city administrator is in charge of fairly hiring the best candidate--a relative or not--this should be a non-issue.

Fire Chief Bob Shaw was a member of the audience who had just finished a presentation on new and proposed programs in his department and asked if civil service testing was an option.

"It is, but believe me you don't want to go there," said Duncan. "It gets complicated."

Apart from how well-intended a hiring policy is, there's nothing easy about it. It's still a political environment. It's sort of like having "smoking" and "non-smoking" areas in the same restaurant dining room.

But, this is an honest effort and certainly worth the trouble to see where it goes.