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DURYEA — After months of struggling to get started, the Duryea Borough Civil Service Commission is finally underway after council passed a motion to accept the rules and regulations of the commission.
The Civil Service Commission will be an agency that regulates the employment and working conditions of civil servants and oversees hiring and promotions within the police department and borough. It will consist of three commissioners, qualified electors by the Duryea Borough and appointed by council to serve for terms of two, four and six years.
Council approved those terms, hiring Robert Webb to a six-year term, Tim Welling to a four-year term and fellow council member Lois Hanczyc to a two-year term.
The commission must organize within 10 days of its appointment and the three members will be self-elected to serve as chairperson, vice-chairperson and secretary. After that, meetings will be held on the first Monday of each even numbered year, meaning the following mandatory meeting would not be held until January 2016.
Some of the regulations consisting within the commission include when meetings are to be held, how many qualified electors council can elect as alternates to those serving on the commission and the authority of the three elected officials.
“We’ve been trying to get it going and one member resigned, so we had to get a new member, start over and they never really got the chance to (actually) meet to start getting this going,” said Council President Jimmy Balchune. “But, now we are locked into it and we will go forward. We will utilize the civil service as is intended.”
In other business, council approved:
• The placement of stop signs at the corner of Columbia and Pond streets.
• To table the motion to appoint Balchune as an alternate representative for Duryea at the Northeast Land Bank Authority meetings should council vice-president and current Duryea representative, Ed Ameika, be unable to attend a meeting.
The next council meeting will be held at 6:30 p.m. on Tuesday, July 14 at the Duryea Borough building, 315 Main St.