Della Rocco to be next Schenectady fire chief

Assistant Fire Chief Michael Della Rocco is getting a promotion on Monday.

City officials said they plan to announce that Della Rocco will become the new fire chief at an 11 a.m. press conference.

However, Acting Mayor Gary McCarthy said he wouldn’t break the news in advance of the event.

“I will say we would be lucky to have someone of his stature take the position,” McCarthy said.

The city would not make Della Rocco available to the media until the promotion and would not release details about his background.

Della Rocco will replace Chief Robert Farstad, who agreed to retire after the City Council made it clear they would not help him increase his pension.

Farstad had lobbied for years to be placed in a better-paying retirement plan. Most of the other firefighters in the city department gave up raises to get into the better plan, but Farstad was a member of management and had to work out his own deal.

He was never able to get city officials to pay for his transfer to the better plan.

Eventually, Farstad convinced Mayor Brian U. Stratton to let him exchange accumulated sick and vacation time for overtime. Through the complicated rules of the state retirement system, the switch would have nearly doubled his approximately $67,000 pension. The result would have been higher than what he would have gotten if he’d been moved to the better retirement plan.

The deal was uncovered through a Freedom of Information request from The Daily Gazette for Farstad’s overtime records, and city officials subsequently told the state not to count Farstad’s overtime toward his pension. The state comptroller’s office investigated the deal and determined that Farstad was not eligible to count any overtime toward his pension because the City Council never approved legislation regulating his overtime.

Council members said they didn’t know about the deal.

As they looked into it, they discovered that Farstad was hardly alone. Several other top fire and police managers were given overtime in their final year without documenting their extra hours. Other employees expect costly special benefits that were never approved by the council but were promised by supervisors.

Since then, the law department has been working on legislation that would specifically require all changes in compensation to be approved by the council before the employee is paid.

Farstad is retiring Sunday.