Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson and his two immediate predecessors made the city vulnerable to accusations of political patronage and favoritism, Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Judge Peter Corrigan has ruled.

In a scathing 15-page decision released Friday, Corrigan blasted Jackson and former Mayors Jane Campbell and Michael R. White for ignoring civil service testing requirements. The city, he wrote, also failed to comply with several court orders stemming from a 15-year-old lawsuit.

Corrigan fined the city $900,750, appointed a special master to oversee Cleveland's Civil Service Commission and ordered Jackson to stop hiring, promoting and transferring employees.

"Abuse of the hiring system has opened the city, the administration and the two prior administrations to allegations of cronyism, corruption and political payback," Corrigan wrote.

The city will immediately appeal, Jackson said in a statement.

The Civil Service Employees Association, a union that represents about 2,500 city workers, sued the city in 1994 over employment practices. The union contends that Cleveland mayors for years skirted hiring rules. In many cases, the city appointed temporary employees to fill certain jobs, then allowed them to stay on without taking civil service qualifying exams.

In other cases, department heads violated rules by making positions noncompetitive, meaning they could hire without using a list of eligible applicants, said a lawyer for the union.

City officials acknowledged last year that more than 900 employees subject to civil service testing never took the exam. Jackson's administration pushed for voter-approved city charter revisions that grandfathered in those employees and altered testing requirements.

The move drew considerable scorn from Corrigan.

"The city does not have a plan in place to comply with [earlier] orders and unapologetically maintains its contempt for those orders, in fact asserting that compliance is not possible or practicable," the judge wrote. "Impossibility and impracticality are not defenses, but excuses."

Jackson suggested that the charter revisions make the ruling moot.

"It is our belief that the court doesn't have the right to silence the voice of the citizens of Cleveland," the mayor said. "The decision conflicts with the will of the electorate and is contrary to the law in several respects. Accordingly, the city will appeal."

Union attorney Kevin Prendergast called Jackson's argument "absolute nonsense." He said a separate challenge of the validity of last year's vote to enact the charter revisions is pending.

"Judge Corrigan really bent over backwards the last three years to work with the city and get them in compliance," Prendergast said. "I think you can see from the ruling that he's fed up."