Recovered e-mail may show city wrongly skipped over disabled vet

By George P. Hassett

Sean O’Brien says he wants to be a Somerville firefighter for the same reason he joined the U.S. Marines: “I want to do my part to help.”

O’Brien, a disabled veteran who served in Iraq between 2005 and 2009, has been denied the opportunity to help despite being number one on a civil service hiring list since last year. He and his supporters say his effort to get on the Somerville Fire Department has been blocked by political cronyism and back door dealing.

After the discovery of an allegedly hidden email last week, city aldermen are taking up his case too.

“I’m disgusted by what the city has done,” O’Brien said in an interview with The Somerville News this week. “It’s not the fire department that’s targeting me, I think it’s the mayor taking care of his own.”

Last week, Alderman-at-Large Bill White produced a Feb. 24 email from the Massachusetts Human Resources Department instructing city lawyer Matthew Buckley to place O’Brien ahead of an applicant who was approved at an alderman’s sub-committee meeting that night. Buckley never informed aldermen of the communication.

The memo also may have been purged from city files. At a September hearing, city staff said they had never seen the communication, according to former alderman Andrew Puglia, who represented O’Brien at the hearing.

At last Thursday’s meeting, aldermen criticized the city’s handling of the case and the missing email.

“If this happened, it’s a disgrace,” said Ward Seven Alderman Bob Trane. “I’m going to have someone’s head on this if it’s true.”

Alderman-at-Large Dennis Sullivan called the city’s handling of O’Brien’s application “a gross injustice.”

Ward Six Alderman Rebekah Gewirtz said O’Brien’s case has revealed deep flaws and questionable methods in the city’s hiring practices within the fire department.

In February 2008, Mayor Joe Curtatone asked for and received approval from the Board of Aldermen to create a permanent reserve fire force. City spokesman Michael Meehan said a reserve force saves the city money and allows for expediency in the hiring and training of new firefighters.

However, Gewirtz said the process discriminates against returning veterans who miss the initial exam while serving overseas. By the time returning veterans take the make-up test, they’ve fallen behind other applicants who have already been placed on the reserve force, she said.

“These are returning veterans and they should get preference in hiring but that is denied to them. It defies the system as it is intended to work,” she said.

The factors working against O’Brien’s candidacy started while he was still serving in Iraq. Over 19 days in July and August 2009, Curtatone and city lawyers alternated between asking the state human resources department for extensions of the civil service lists to hire new recruits and telling the state agency that financial constraints would prevent the city from hiring new firefighters.

The changing requests produced two different civil service lists. The only significant difference between the two lists, according to a Somerville News review, is that one candidate, Timothy O’Hearn, did not sign the first one.

O’Hearn is the fiancee of firefighter Danielle Revis, who is the niece of Somerville Fire Lt. Charles Houghton. Supporters of O’Brien say he was skipped in favor of O’Hearn due to O’Hearn’s family connections to the department and within the city.

In March, O’Hearn and five others were appointed as full time Somerville firefighters.

In September, civil service Chairman Christopher C. Bowman ruled that O’Brien be given retroactive seniority equal to the firefighters appointed in March. A week before the hearing, three more applicants were made permanent firefighters.

Puglia, a former attorney disbarred in 1998, has represented O’Brien, his son-in-law, at city and civil service hearings. He said the three applicants appointed in September each had family and financial connections to firefighters and politicians in the city.

“The mayor and the aldermen march in the Memorial Day parades, but they screw the disabled veteran when it’s time to take care of their crony’s,” Puglia said.

Meehan, the city’s spokesman, denied charges of favoritism in the city’s hiring process. He said the February memo from the human resources office to city lawyers was followed by a conversation in which Luz Henriquez, from the state human resources office, verbally instructed the city not to include O’Brien and another applicant, Justin Bonner, on the list.

That conversation was never mentioned at the September civil service hearing, Puglia said.

O’Brien, the father of two young daughters, is working for the Department of the Army and still hoping to be hired as a firefighter.

“I’ve been disturbed by the city’s actions,” he said. “I lived in the city my whole life, did two tours of duty in Iraq, now to go through this when I come home is upsetting,” he said.

“I always wanted to be a firefighter, it’s an honorable job.”