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Nichole Jefferson.
The Harp administration has decided to continue fighting rulings that it should rehire its former equal-hiring chief.
In the latest step in a long-running City Hall saga, the administration is appealing a state Superior Court Judge’s April 2 ruling ordering the city to rehire Nichole Jefferson as executive director of the Commission on Equal Opportunities and give her back pay.
Mayoral spokesman Laurence Grotheer Thursday confirmed the decision to appeal. He declined further comment.
The judge’s April 2 decision upheld an earlier arbitrator’s decision that the city mishandled its firing of Jefferson for “grave violations of ethics and public trust.”
“We looked at the decision the judge made. It seemed to be at conflict with itself,” Mayor Toni Harp said during a a recent appearance on WNHH FM’s “Mayor Monday” program. She declined to discuss the specifics of the case further because, she said, it’s a personnel issue.
In his April 2 decision in the case City of New Haven v. AFSCME Co. 4, Local 3144, Superior Court Judge James Wilson Abrams focused on two legal terms of art.
The first term is “egregious.” The judge wrote in the decision that city did make its case that Jefferson acted “egregiously” under the law.
“[T]he City argues that the activities that led to Ms. Jefferson’s termination violated and implicate the City’s Ethics Ordinances, the State Ethics Code, and certain criminal statutes. The court concedes that the issues raised implicate strong public policy concerns,” the judge wrote.
The second term is “incorrigible.” The city has to prove that Jefferson’s behavior was so “incorrigible” that it had to fire her outright rather than follow a series of steps of progressive discipline. The city failed that test, in the judge’s opinion.
“While the court finds that there was actual harm sufficient to consider the behavior at issue egregious, it finds insufficient support for the argument that Ms. Jefferson would not respond appropriately to progressive workplace discipline and, as a result, it can not find her ‘incorrigible,’” Judge Abrams wrote.
“Based on the foregoing, the court finds that the violation of public policy at issue in this case does not mandate termination and the defendant’s application to confirm the arbitration award is granted.”
The Background
The Harp administration fired Jefferson as executive director of the Commission on Equal Opportunities in 2015, sparking a drawn-out and acrimonious legal battle.
The CEO is charged with enforcing a city ordinance requiring the hiring of black and and Latino and female workers and minority-owned and female-headed firms on government-funded construction projects.
The long-running dispute began over institutional ethics and transparency, and developed into a battle over the rules for removing government employees.
When Jefferson ran the CEO, she simultaneously ran a nonprofit with a similar mission out of the same office, dealing with the same unions and contractors whose work she was charged with regulating in her city job. She enjoyed a reputation for hard work and producing results.
When Toni Harp took office as mayor in 2014, supported by critics of the CEO, she installed one of those critics to run the commission that oversees the agency. Then her administration fired Jefferson. It cited ethical concerns about how the city agency and nonprofit intertwined, and what it said were Jefferson’s refusals to produce documentation, including Form 990 tax returns, for how her nonprofit spent public money. City Hall also said it couldn’t find years worth of minutes for meetings of the commission charged with overseeing the CEO.
The city wrestled for months after the firing with Jefferson and her supporters for physical control of a city-owned building that housed the agency. When the city eventually regained control, officials said they found furniture gone and the facility vandalized, with cement poured down the drains. (Jefferson said the furnishings belonged to her.)
Jefferson adamantly denied any unethical behavior or failure to account for spending.
She also swung back against accusations from the Harp administration that she had committed crimes. The administration handed the U.S. attorney’s office a report alleging serious criminal behavior by Jefferson — and the office concluded that the accusations had no merit.
In addition, confidential internal emails from the corporation counsel’s office were made public, stating that the mayor personally was looking for ways to fire Jefferson and her staff— a revelation that helped Jefferson’s cause as she appealed her termination.
Jefferson charged the city unjustly fired her and smeared her reputation. Siding with the city on some specific claims but with Jefferson on others, the state Board of Mediation and Arbitration ruled last year that the city must reinstate Jefferson and pay her for lost back wages. The Harp administration appealed in Superior Court, where a judge last week upheld the mediation board’s ruling.