A Yonkers woman's quest to become a city FF

[Guest EM2FD]

A Yonkers woman's quest to become a city firefighter

By MICHAEL GANNON

THE JOURNAL NEWS

(Original Publication: March 31, 2006)

An open door that few women enter

A quarter-century after a series of lawsuits in New York City and Westchester County resulted in a federal consent order that required fire departments in New York City, Yonkers, Mount Vernon, White Plains and New Rochelle to make a more concerted effort to recruit and hire minorities and women, few females have entered the profession.

Lianne Navedo wants to be a firefighter, not a pioneer. Passion drove Navedo to strengthen her athletic, though slender, 120-pound frame to the point where she could lug a 55-pound, 100-foot hose up six stories and back down faster than most men. The recognition, sure to come for breaking down barriers that have stood for more than a century, was never a thought.

Regardless, Navedo is a pioneer. When Yonkers hires its next firefighters, Navedo, 37, is all but assured of being among them. She would be the first woman ever to join the 110-year-old department, Westchester's largest, and one of fewer than a handful of women to work for paid departments in the county's history.

Her shot at a job, however, would not have come without the intervention of federal law enforcement. The U.S. Justice Department in 2004 had to order the city's fire department to keep open a civil-service list on which Navedo ranks 12th. Fire officials claim they have not tried to avoid hiring Navedo, but the fact that Yonkers is among the largest departments in the country without a woman suggests institutional resistance to breaking the ranks of a male-dominated profession.

Navedo, however, does not like to talk about her battle. She only reluctantly agreed to be interviewed for this article after fighting the city for more than a year. Without assigning blame or expressing resentment, she wants only what is rightfully hers.

"I'm ready," she said during a recent interview at her northeast Yonkers home. "I'm trying to be patient. When they call, I'm ready."

Navedo was moved to become a firefighter after watching the recovery effort following the collapse of the World Trade Center. She had recently married Yonkers Fire Lt. Ed Navedo and was touched by his and other firefighters' emotional reaction to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, which killed 343 New York City firefighters.

Ed Navedo, a 19-year veteran of the Yonkers department, had hoped his 18-year-old son from a prior marriage would take the civil-service test, which includes a written exam and a gruelling physical component that weeds out most of the thousands of applicants. But it was his wife who was interested.

Lianne Navedo — a physical therapist who works with disabled children — was in excellent physical condition. Many men, however, have difficulty passing the test. Lianne would have to do extensive training to build her strength and beat out thousands of competitors, not only to put her in a position to win a job, but to earn the respect of her peers should she succeed.

"I told her it wasn't a free ride," her husband said. "She had to earn this; she had to pull her own weight."

With her husband's guidance and support, Navedo began an intense training program eight months before the physical portion of the October 2002 civil-service exam.

The test, conducted at the county training center in Valhalla, consists of two pass/fail and four timed components. They include dragging a hose up and down a building's staircase and pulling a 50-pound weight attached to a rope and pulley 20 feet off the ground.

Three times a week, in addition to her regular running routine, Navedo rigged household items into strength-training tools. She attached weights to a double-extension ladder and pressed it above her head in her backyard. She carried a 50-pound bag of sand up and down a staircase on Lake Avenue while wearing a 25-pound weight vest to simulate carrying a hose up the stairs while wearing equipment.

She also hit the gym and studied for the written exam.

The day of the test, Navedo aced the pass/fail components and raised eyebrows with her times. She attracted curiosity and encouragement from her male competitors, she said.

"Guys were aware of her," said Jason Dorsey, who competed the same day as Navedo and ended up finishing a spot ahead of her on the civil-service list. "Word was floating around that she did really incredible on her times."

Exhausted but happy to be done, Navedo completed the test and waited the six months for the list to be established. She did not yet know how she scored on the written portion, which is weighed equally with the physical, but she and Ed were reasonably confident, her husband said.

"It was a matter of wait and see how the other guys did on the test," he said.

Yonkers has never had a woman firefighter, despite a 1980 federal consent decree requiring the department to create recruitment and hiring practices to bring the department's racial and gender makeup up to par with the city's civilian work force.

The consent decree was the result of legal action brought by the Vulcan Society of Westchester, a fraternal order of black firefighters, and subsequent involvement by the U.S. Justice Department. The legal actions targeted fire departments in Yonkers, Mount Vernon, White Plains and New Rochelle. New York City was going through a similar legal process about the same time.

Despite modest gains for minorities over more than two decades — blacks and Hispanics make up 10 percent of the Yonkers Fire Department — women firefighters in Westchester remain almost nonexistent.

Of the four departments subject to the consent decree, only Mount Vernon has employed a woman. Carolyn McKoy joined the department in 1988 and left in the early 1990s. Eastchester is now the only professional department in the county to employ a woman, Tina Kapoor Martinez.

Representatives of the four city departments say they have made efforts to recruit women. Curtis Bracy, president of the Vulcan Society of Westchester and a Yonkers fire captain, said Yonkers has averaged about 30 women out of 2,000 applicants for its exams since the consent decree. None, to his knowledge, have ever scored well enough to be hired, he said.

The failure to hire a woman over 26 years leaves Yonkers, with 473 members, one of the largest paid municipal fire departments in the country without a woman member, said Terese Floren, executive director of Women in the Fire Service Inc., a Madison, Wis.-based nonprofit organization.

In comparison, Minneapolis has the highest percentage of women — 17 percent, or 69 of its 418 members, including its chief. Women make up about 2 percent of firefighters in paid departments throughout the country but have struggled to make gains on the more tradition-heavy East Coast, Floren said.

Women in the Fire Service's Web site, www.wfsi.org, cites a number of obstacles for women in firefighting. They include an attachment to an all-male workplace and the cost of re-equipping fire houses with bathrooms, sleeping quarters and equipment.

"When the culture of the fire station and the fire service becomes so entrenched, it becomes difficult to remove the barriers that would put women and people of color in those jobs," said Floren, a retired firefighter from Ohio.

When Yonkers' civil-service list finally came out in June 2003, Navedo's hard work was rewarded.

Her score placed her 53rd out of 360 applicants who passed the written and pass/fail components of the test. That standing all but assured her of a job, based on the department's past practices.

In six prior civil-service tests given since the consent decree in 1980, all generated lists that produced between 54 and 79 new eligible firefighters, according to statistics provided by Victor Pacheco, secretary of the city's Civil Service Commission.

Incoming classes of firefighters in a single year ranged from as few as five in 1984 to as many as 48 in 2000.

The 2003 civil-service list resulted in 39 new hires in July of that year, Pacheco said. Navedo was 12th in line to be hired for the next class. But that's where Yonkers' longstanding budget problems and the city's fire department got in the way.

The city did not hire new firefighters in 2004, when it eliminated hundreds of school jobs to close a $50 million budget hole. The city eliminated six vacant firefighting positions last year to help bridge another gap. Meanwhile, the city offered a new civil-service exam last year that would, if established, create a new list.

Fire Commissioner Anthony Pagano, who took over the department in 2002 after serving as head of the firefighters union, said he had long believed it was not in the city's best interests to extend civil-service lists more than two years. Keeping lists around longer allows applicants to age or fall out of shape, Pagano said.

No other list since 1980 was kept for less than three or more than five years. The consent decree, however, requires that new tests be offered every two years, unless the Vulcan Society agrees to extend them. Pagano, who acknowledged Navedo's score was "pretty damn good," adamantly denied the new test was offered as a way around hiring her.

"The facts are, that is far from what I was thinking," Pagano said. "If she was number three, she would have got hired. If she was number 36, she would have got hired."

Navedo declined to talk about the department's move to offer a new test. Her actions, however, speak to her frame of mind.

She contacted the Justice Department, which launched an investigation into the fire department's compliance with the consent decree. In December 2004, the Justice Department ordered the city to hire Navedo in its next class of firefighters.

With Pagano's support, Local 628, the city's firefighters union, introduced a bill to the Yonkers City Council last month that would limit new firefighter applicants to those between 19 and 29 years old. Pagano said the bill, if adopted, would not apply retroactively to 37-year-old Navedo or anyone else.

The council has yet to consider the bill.

Navedo would have preferred to pass through the city's civil-service system with no fanfare, from success on the written and physical exams to a job with the fire department.

The Navedos kept Lianne's training to themselves. They went through the legal process with the Justice Department behind the scenes.

In the interview in her home, Navedo only guardedly offered details about her life. She declined to go into much detail about the struggle she has endured. And she spoke of her training and accomplishments without a hint of self-importance.

She is not out of the woods yet. Yonkers is still mired in a budget crisis and facing a projected deficit. There are 12 vacancies in the fire department because of retirements, but Pagano said he would not hire a class of fewer than 20. It does not make financial sense to send fewer recruits to training, he said. No one could say when the city would be willing to hire its next class.

Pagano said the department will have to make only minor adjustments to accommodate a woman, including adding an "occupied" sign to bathroom doors and working out suitable sleeping arrangements.

So Navedo just sits, waits and hopes. She is staying in shape, including training for a triathlon at West Point. And she refuses to acknowledge the enormity of what she is trying to do.

In her mind, joining the nearly all-male world of firefighting is still not about breaking down barriers, no matter how much she has had to fight to get where she is. It is simply about doing a job that inspired her and that she earned.

"I don't expect to be welcomed," she said. "I don't think there's not going to be resistance. But I feel like, because I didn't ask for special treatment, I feel like eventually, I'll earn the respect of my co-workers. And those that I don't, I wouldn't be able to earn their respect anyway."

Career firefighters Total women % of total

United States (estimate) 296,850 6,160 2

Westchester County 950 1 0.001

New York City 11,468 33 0.003

Yonkers 473 0 0

New Rochelle 165 0 0

Mount Vernon 150 0 0

White Plains 161 0 0

Sources: National Fire Protection Association; Women in the Fire Service Inc.; the fire departments of New York City, Yonkers, Mount Vernon, White Plains and New Rochelle; the Vulcan Society of Westchester; and Westchester County.

By the numbers

States with the highest number of professional women firefighters

1. California: 1,297

2. Florida: 775

3. Texas: 324

4. Maryland: 249

5. Virginia: 234

15. New York: 98

Urban fire departments (more than 75 career personnel) with the highest percentage of women firefighters

• Minneapolis: 17

• Madison, Wis.: 15

• San Francisco: 15

• Boulder, Colo.: 14

• Miami/Dade County, Fla.: 13

Source: Women in the Fire Service Inc.

Women on the fire lines

The number of women career firefighters

United States

6,160

Westchester County

1

Mount Vernon

0

New Rochelle

0

White Plains

0

Yonkers

0