Fire Officials Keep Current Hiring Process : Jobs: County authority decides not to reopen search or reschedule endurance trials to draw women and minorities.

Orange County fire officials said Tuesday they will not scrap recent firefighter test results, which include just two women among 915 possible recruits, in part because residents and firefighters feared that recruiting more women would lower department standards.

Fire officials had considered reopening the search for recruits to encourage more women and minorities to apply. But at the end of a controversial six-week review, department officials said Tuesday they will proceed with the current pool of applicants.

“It looks like they are comfortable that they have done everything they could” to recruit women, Capt. Dan Young said.

Young said he received more than 100 phone calls and dozens of letters in recent weeks from firefighters and residents. He said they expressed fears that adjusting the recruitment process to attract more women could compromise department standards, and they felt it would be unfair for those who had already passed the test.

Other residents criticized the proposed change at meetings of the 21-member joint powers authority, which governs the county’s largest fire department.

“We work for the community and their opinions and their feelings mean a lot to us,” Young said. “We have a very definite feel for the pulse of a community that does not want a reduction in the quality of the pool of our firefighters.”

Young added, however, that the department never intended to lower its standards and “can’t ignore the legal requirements that we meet equal employment opportunity guidelines--that we do everything we can to try to bring greater diversity to the department.”

“We are still very committed to that,” he said.

The Fire Authority made an unprecedented push last year to recruit a group of new hires that was representative of the community, both in ethnicity and gender. A fairly high number of women passed a written exam last December, but the county’s bankruptcy delayed the physical endurance portion of the exam until summer.

Many women who had been invited to take the endurance test did not show up, possibly because of the time lag. Of 46 women who took the agility test, only two passed.

Fire officials were considering either shelving the whole testing process and beginning again, or inviting some of the women who had either failed the endurance test or not shown up for it to retest.

Noel Landreth, 22, a state beach lifeguard in San Clemente, said she did not pass the written exam and was not invited to take the endurance test. But she was nevertheless appalled that the authority was considering changing the procedure. Landreth called Tuesday’s decision “terrific.”

“To go back and change what you already specified to all the applicants, male and female, would have just been disastrous,” she said. “Their decision to keep things fair and to give the public the best possible service makes me want to try out again.”

Within the month, the 915 applicants in the current pool of recruits will take a “skills assessment” test to gauge their ability to follow instructions. That should narrow the pool by half, said Young, and those people will then be interviewed in person.

The department hopes to select 30 new hires who will enter the authority’s Fire Academy by January of next year, Young said.

In a memo sent Tuesday to firefighters and members of the joint powers authority, Fire Chief Larry J. Holms stressed that “community and work force safety is unquestionably the top priority of this organization.”

But Holms also said that “the Orange County Fire Authority is deeply committed to work force diversity and will aggressively pursue avenues to hire qualified and competent employees from all facets of the community.”