The Selma City Council approved a resolution last week that will allow department heads to live within the city or county limits. Since 2014, department heads have been required to live within the city limits.

The new policy allows the city clerk, Ivy Harrison, to keep her position and allows any other department head to live outside the city limit too.

The debate over whether or not department heads, including our police chief and fire chief, should have to live within the city limits has been going on for years.

Now that the city council has made a decision, the debate needs to end. It is important for this requirement to be consistently applied to every department head position, which means it can’t be changed because the friend of a friend, or a really qualified candidate, lives just outside the county.

The last two years the rule wasn’t changed, and it’s in the very least impacted the number of candidates that could apply for a position. Since 2014, city employees have been told they couldn’t advance in their career because they lived outside the city limits.

Now, the living requirements for city employees has changed again, and we’re OK with that, as long as it’s fairly applied and doesn’t come up for debate every six months or so as it has in the past.

The law needs to be consistent and should not be changed in the near future, no matter who it affects.

People who work in the city need to know the living requirements for moving up in their career and those requirements shouldn’t be regularly changing.