By William Kaempffer, Register Staff

NEW HAVEN — As eyes across America focus on New Haven and await a potentially landmark Supreme Court decision today on the firefighters’ promotion case, it’s all old news in the city firehouses.

Firefighters didn’t huddle daily at station computers to see if the court had ruled yet, a union official said. Fire Chief Michael Grant described operations in the department as “business as usual.”

“You don’t really hear personnel talking about the status of the case,” said Firefighter Patrick Egan, president of the firefighter union.

“When you’re in the firehouse, even among a group of guys, I can’t recall the last time it actually came up. You’ll have more debate about what’s for lunch than what the Supreme Court will rule,” Egan said.

The lack of firehouse debate, however, shouldn’t be misconstrued as disinterest. Everyone, Egan said, recognizes the magnitude of the case.

“You have to understand, for us, it’s 5 years old,” Egan said, looking back to 2004 when the city first reported potential problems with two promotional tests. “For the rest of the country, it’s 5 months old.”

Over the last five months, since the Supreme Court accepted the case, the spotlight has been on New Haven, and the national media have doggedly pursued interviews with the plaintiffs, who claim they were illegally denied promotions because they are white, their lawyer, the city’s top attorney and minority firefighters who insist the two promotional exams at the center of the high-profile case were flawed.

The attention was magnified when President Barack Obama nominated to the Supreme Court Judge Sonia Sotomayor, who sat on the appellate court panel in 2008 that issued a controversial one-paragraph decision upholding the district court’s 2006 dismissal of the lawsuit.

A high court decision is anticipated this morning in Ricci v. DeStefano, which experts say could change how municipalities across the country treat race in employment. Twenty New Haven firefighters — 19 white and one Hispanic — sued Mayor John DeStefano Jr. and other city officials in 2004 after the city threw out the results of two promotional exams.

The city maintains it threw out the exams because blacks performed disproportionately poorly, and none scored well enough to be promoted to the vacancies at the time. Continued...

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City attorneys have said that if the tests were certified, African-American firefighters could have sued the city because the results had a disparate impact on them, in possible violation of civil rights laws. The so-called New Haven 20 argued the city violated their right to equal treatment, saying they were denied promotion because they were white.

The legal arguments, in essence, put the two fundamental tenets of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 at war.

“The entire nation is watching,” Scot X. Esdaile, president of the state NAACP, said recently in describing the importance of the case from a civil rights perspective.

Grant said the case and the glare of the spotlight has not been a distraction.

“It’s business as usual. Everything that’s going out on the street is being taken care of and obviously we’re answering all the calls without any difficulties. They’re very professional,” Grant said of his staff.

That’s not to say there haven’t been tensions. In 2004, racial friction erupted during a series of contentious meetings of the Civil Service Commission. The Hispanic member of the so-called New Haven 20 was beaten in a bar bathroom, although police never found evidence that the black firefighters he had encountered a short time earlier were in any way responsible. The city launched an investigation after a poem disparaging the study habits of the black firefighters showed up in one of the firehouses.

Since then, there also was tension over a Hispanic firefighter association’s decision not to join ranks with the group of black firefighters in support of tossing the exams.

Lt. Gary Tinney, an outspoken leader in the Firebirds, a fraternal organization for African-American firefighters and who in the past had said black firefighters had to “watch their backs,” said some firehouse tensions do remain, but he took a more measured stance last week.

“We come to work, do our job and put everything else aside. We have to come in to take care of business and that’s basically what we do. We’re not going to hate anybody or dislike anybody because of their view,” Tinney said.

Any racial divide in the department, according to both Firefighter Rene Cordova, president of a Hispanic firefighter association, and Egan, has been wildly overstated, perhaps perpetuated by a small number of firefighters who described the firehouses as racial tinderboxes. Continued...

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“There’s no tension. I think everybody goes about their business,” said Cordova, who works in the department’s training academy. “It’s not even talked about at all. It’s only in the media.”

On a day-to-day basis, blacks, whites and Hispanics work, train, eat and socialize together without any thought of the Supreme Court case, Egan insisted.

That might be hard for outsiders to comprehend, he said. Members of the fire service, like any family, he said, do have their disagreements, but that doesn’t undermine the foundation of the relationships that have been forged.

“There are times that you look at a particular family, and you can’t understand how the family works. The media will never understand this about us,” Egan said.

William Kaempffer can be reached at 789-5727 or wkaempffer@nhregister.com.

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