Judge’s Ruling Sides With City, Against Alders In Ongoing Ricci Suit

A state judge agreed to strike two key counts and a request for an injunction from the Board of Alders’ ongoing lawsuit against the mayor over former fire union President Frank Ricci’s pension benefits.

One of the lawyer’s attorneys promised that the case is far from over — and that the alders will seek a new remedy to stop Ricci from continuing to get the pension enhancement.

Those decisions came down from State Superior Court Judge James Abrams on Thursday.

Abrams found that the court cannot reverse a retirement perk that’s already been paid in the case Board of Alders v. City of New Haven. The alders filed the suit to try to stop the city from paying out retirement benefits because the legal process to approve it hadn’t been followed.

Abrams found that the court cannot ​“put the toothpaste back in the tube,” as it were, because the city has already paid the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company for a $386,659.92 annuity for Ricci. The injunction sought by the alders is in vain, he wrote, because the action in dispute has already occurred.

“The defendants are alleged to have already negotiated and purchased the annuity for the benefit of Ricci without the plaintiff’s authorization,” Abrams wrote. ​“The requested injunction cannot remedy what has already been done. To the extent this injunctive request is concerned with possible future pension negotiations with Ricci, such a concern is speculative, predicated on fear and apprehension rather than fact. There are no facts alleged to suggest the defendants plan to unilaterally negotiate any further pension deals with Ricci, or any other city employee for that matter.”

Abrams subsequently granted motions to strike filed separately by the city and the fire union, Local 825.

Click here and here to read his decisions.

Attorney Steve Mednick, a former alder who is representing the Board of Alders in the matter along with fellow attorney and former Westville Alder Jonathan Einhorn, told the Independent Friday afternoon that these decisions do not spell the end of the lawsuit. Far from it.

“We can’t enjoin the city” from paying Met Life for the annuity, he said, but the alders can still enjoin Met Life from continuing to pay out that annuity to Ricci. He said the alders intend to seek other remedies to make sure that they get to sign off on the pension enhancement, as it is worth more than $100,000 and therefore passes a local legal threshold requiring aldermanic approval.

“We still have a case against the city,” Mednick said. He said the alders plan to submit new filings in the case within the next two weeks.

The two rulings granting the city’s and the union’s motions to strike nevertheless represent a setback for the alders in the an intra-local-governmental legal dispute that has been making its way through state court since June 2020.

The core of the original complaint was the alders’ contention that Mayor Justin Elicker allegedly overstepped his local authority when he struck an agreement with the former fire union president in May 2020 that required the city to pay for a $386,659.92 annuity on top of Ricci’s existing pension benefits.

The mayor has defended his actions as legally required per a memorandum of understanding (MOU) first signed in 2006 between the DeStefano Administration and the fire union, then amended in 2019 by the Harp Administration to provide specifically for Ricci.

In subsequent hearings in state court, the two sides have argued over whether or not the court can stop, or even reverse, an annuity payment that’s already occurred.

In his decisions Thursday, Abrams sided with the city and the fire union against the alders, arguing that the original lawsuit was lacking in two key areas: It did not adequately argue that the alders face ​“irreparable harm” because of the annuity payment. And it did not show that the alders lack an adequate ​“remedy at law” to resolve the dispute.

“To determine whether a particular harm is irreparable, courts focus on the nature of the right injuriously affected rather than the pecuniary measure of the loss endured,” Abrams wrote in his decision granting the city’s motion to strike.

A plaintiff must allege that, if not for the injunction, there is a ​“substantial probability” that they will suffer irreparable harm.

“The plaintiff’s complaint is devoid of any allegation that it would face a substantial probability of irreparable harm unless injunctive relief is granted,” Abrams found. ​“There are no facts alleged from which such an allegation could even be implied. The injunction the plaintiff seeks in counts one and two is to prohibit the defendants from circumventing the authority of the plaintiff to enhance Ricci’s pension. This circumvention, however, is alleged to have already occurred.”

Abrams similarly granted the fire union’s motion to strike a section of the original lawsuit that argued that the union should have known at the time that the alders needed to sign off on Ricci’s pension enhancement agreement.

“The plaintiff’s complaint is devoid of any allegation that it would face a substantial probability of irreparable harm unless injunctive relief is granted,” the judge wrote in his decision on the fire union’s motion. ​“There are no facts alleged from which such an allegation could even be implied. Furthermore, because the complaint does not even specify the type of injunctive relief it seeks against the defendant, it is impossible to establish that the plaintiff would be irreparably harmed but for the issuance of the injunction. This, alone, renders count three legally insufficient. Therefore, the motion to strike count three of the complaint is hereby granted.”

Other counts of the lawsuit that remain to be decided are directed against Metropolitan Life Insurance, and against Ricci and his wife Christine.

Correction: A previous version of this article stated that Judge Abrams’s decisions threw out a majority of the alders’ lawsuit. The article has been corrected to reflect that the case is still active and the alders plan on filing motions requesting different remedies than just the now-struck injunctions.