A fourth ward and mayoral and alderman four-year terms may be in Derby's future - CT Insider

Posted: 16 May 2020 03:00 AM PDT

DERBY — Increasing the number of aldermen and doubling the mayor's term to four years are among the items the Board of Alderman have asked the Charter Revision Commission to consider.

The Aldermen took the action during their three-hour digital platform meeting Thursday night.

The 10-member Charter Revision Commission created in February has yet to have a meeting, said Rob Hyder, a member and third ward alderman.

"I anticipate the first meeting will be held in the next couple of weeks," he said. "When the commission was selected, I was hoping we'd have recommendations completed by July. Since we haven't met yet, we have a lot of ground to make up."

The commission could be up against a deadline: to get referendum questions on the November ballot, recommendations need to be completed by Labor Day, Town/City Clerk Marc Garofalo has said.

Hyder said the commission first needs to elect a chairman and conduct a public hearing which he expects will be done through a virtual platform.

"We need to hear from the taxpayers themselves," he said. "While we received solid recommendations from the Board of Aldermen, we do not necessarily have to submit those recommendation but at least review and consider them."

Ron Sill, a longtime second ward alderman, said he was worried about the timeline since the group's first meeting will not be public gatherings and "public input is important."

"I'm a little disappointed the commission has not yet met," Sill said. "Chances are, their work might not be completed in time for November."

Camille Grande Kurtyka, a first term second ward alderman, suggested creating a fourth voting ward.

Grande said the third ward has by far the largest number of registered voters and that redistricting the city into four wards would equalize numbers.

"Redistricting has to be done every 10 years and it was not done after the 2010 Census," said Garofalo. "The charter required it be done after each census."

Garofalo said while there are 1,765 registered voters in the first ward, 2,190 in the second and 2,616 in the third, redistricting is based on the number of residents, not voters.

A redistricting committee will need to be appointed and use the new census data to "redraw the lines so that each ward has approximately the same number of people living in it. ...If it stays at three wards, then each ward would have approximately 4,166 people. If the charter is changed to four wards, then each would be approximately 3,125," he said.

Sill recommended adding a fourth alderman in each of the three wards and increasing both their terms and the mayor's to four years.

He also suggested doing away with the current 10-member Board of Apportionment and Taxation and replace it by an Aldermanic Finance Committee consisting of five to seven members who would compose a budget. Their budget would then be voted on by the full Board of Aldermen.

"Don't get me wrong. I have nothing against the Tax Board. But it's getting harder and harder to find people to run for office," Sill said. "We scrambled to get people to run last year."

He said he anticipated that, under his proposal, some current BOAT members would run for Aldermen.

Charles Sampson, who presided over the Alderman during Mayor Richard Dziekan's first term, proposed several changes to both the mayor's term and salary and changes to the qualifications for police chief and the method of selecting new police officers.

Sampson, a Westport police officer, said he wants to increase the mayor's first term from two years to four and then return to two-year terms for succeeding terms. He also said he wants to change the position from part-time to full-time.

"Unfortunately, the incoming mayor must now inherit the last administration's...budget and does not have a full accounting of the budget until the second year," Sampson wrote his fellow Aldermen. "This leaves many issues to resolve and, as recently seen, could cause animosity to the first-year incumbent based on the last administration's actions."

Several years ago, a budget mistake that double-booked a $1,241,154 state education Alliance grant in the city's budget created a shortfall that led to a tax increase.

It also nearly cost Dziekan a second term as mayor.

Sampson also said he wants the Charter Revision Commission to consider making the city treasurer's position an appointed, rather than an elected, position.

He also recommended requiring qualifications for police chief include a bachelor's degree in criminal justice, business administration or other public service degree. He said the Deputy Chief should be next in line and if that person does not meet the qualifications, then the test should be open to sergeants and above.

If none of those qualify, then the search should go outside the department, he wrote.

As for new police officers, he recommended hiring a vetted agency to conduct written and oral tests from which they would create a list of qualified candidates. He also suggested giving the police chief the authority to hire lateral transfers from other departments as long as they meet minimum qualifications and pass psychological and polygraph tests.

Can Depression and Anxiety Affect a Polygraph Exam? - ClearanceJobs

Posted: 26 Aug 2019 12:00 AM PDT

Earlier this month, I received a letter from a reader who is a decades-long veteran of the security clearance world. He has previously passed the counterintelligence (CI) polygraph accompanying his TS/SCI with flying colors, as well as his periodic reinvestigations. Recently, however, when he was hooked up to a polygraph machine for a re-examination… he failed. He was told by the examiner that he was "all over the place," and withholding conscious thoughts.

The reader writes that he was not, in fact, withholding information, and could easily pass a reinvestigation. The problem as he sees it is that the further into the polygraph examination he got, the greater the pressure he felt. An awful lot was riding on this test, after all: his livelihood, his career, his dignity, his family's financial well being—it was as though the weight of the world rested on every answer he gave. It was one giant mind-warp, and so he failed.

Complicating matters is that he has been diagnosed with mild depression. (The anxiety is obvious.) To get to the bottom of things, and to figure out how our reader might proceed from here, I reached out to the experts. And what I learned was… not encouraging! The problem isn't our reader. It's the examination itself.

"Polygraph tests are not a valid technique for assessing truthfulness," says Leonard Saxe, a social psychologist and professor at Brandeis University. He has studied polygraph tests for over 30 years. "I recognize that polygraph tests may still be required for jobs requiring a security clearance. Other than protesting their use, I'm not sure what to advise a person who fails an examination. Assessing autonomic nervous system reactions to questions about one's history should not be part of how individuals are selected for sensitive jobs."

Sean Bigley, an attorney practicing security clearance law and a regular ClearanceJobs contributor, says that failing a polygraph while being truthful "happens all the time," but that alone is not grounds for a clearance revocation. Security Executive Agent Directive-4—a government-wide policy since June 2017—prohibits the use of polygraph technical calls (e.g., the determination that someone is being deceptive) as the basis for denial or revocation of one's security clearance.

Specifically, the guideline states: "No negative inference concerning eligibility under these guidelines may be raised solely on the basis of mental health counseling. No adverse action concerning these guidelines may be taken solely on the basis of polygraph examination technical calls in the absence of adjudicatively significant information."

To deny or revoke a clearance based on a polygraph examination, in other words, now explicitly requires either an admission of adverse information, or, Bigley says, "the use of detected countermeasures like controlled breathing to defeat the test."

HOW DEPRESSION AND ANXIETY AFFECT THE POLYGRAPH

Forty million adults in America suffer from anxiety-related disorders, and the clearance community is not immune to this.

"The polygraph examiner is supposed to take baseline readings and account for medical conditions like anxiety," explains Bigley. The problem is that examiners are not physicians and have a tendency to make assumptions about physiological reactions that they are not adequately trained to make—or aren't supported by science. "This is one of the reasons why polygraph examinations are inherently unreliable and generally inadmissible in court. It is unfortunate that the intelligence community continues to rely on them as the great arbiter of security-worthiness."

The question, then, is whether pharmaceuticals designed to treat anxiety and depression play a role in one's passage or failure of the polygraph. The answer: sort of. Dr. Saxe explains: "The fundamental problem is that there is no unique physiological response to lying. So, yes, anxiety plays a role, as do medications that affect heart rate and blood pressure."

Bigley concurs. In theory, he says, both anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medications can impact physiological readings, but so can something as innocuous as failing to eat breakfast, or running up a flight of stairs before the exam. Such actions skew one's baseline readings. "I won't purport to be a medical expert," he says, "but my point is that there are all sorts of things that can impact an exam and it is a complete fallacy to call the polygraph a 'lie detector.'"

So if you've failed a poly but have done nothing wrong, what can you do? According to Bigley, if the position in question requires favorable completion of a polygraph, Security Executive Agent Directive-4 won't help you. Failing a polygraph examination based solely on a "deception" determination or an inconclusive result can still be the basis for a "suitability denial" or "administrative withdrawal of access."

The good news, to the extent that there is good news: "Neither of those outcomes are reportable on the SF-86," he says. "So going forward, the individual can still apply to cleared jobs that don't require a polygraph."

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