Markeshia Ricks Photo
Brantley.
Aaron Brantley, a city firefighter convicted of attempted bribery, is seeking to obtain a disability pension from the city before he gets fired.
The city’s corporation counsel, John Rose, said Friday that his office will seek to convince the Fire Commission to terminate Brantley’s employment at a special meeting — which has been rescheduled three times.
Rose said he acted because of Brantley’s conviction on felony attempted bribery charges. A three-judge state appellate panel upheld the conviction in a ruling released last month, as detailed in this previous article.
“Our intention is to fire him. The fire rules are clear — the embarrassment to the city and to the department is immense,” Rose said.
But the city might not get the chance to fire Brantley, thanks to a shuffling of dates for city commission meetings.
Brantley submitted an application to the city for a service connected disability retirement, according to an April 27 memo by city Payroll/Benefit Auditor Alissa Ebbson, obtained by the Independent.
Brantley, who is 36 years old, doesn’t have enough years with the department to retire as of right. He needs to win approval from the Policeman and Fireman’s Pension Fund to win a disability pension instead. That fund’s board has a meeting scheduled for May 16; as of Friday the agenda for that meeting had not been publicly released. Brantley suffered an injury to the rotator cuff in his right shoulder in 2011, according to Rose. He subsequently returned to the job.
To retire, Brantley would need to be working for the city. If he’s fired, he is not working for the city any longer.
The Fire Commission originally planned to hold a special meeting in April to consider his termination. That meeting had to be canceled because the fire union hadn’t received required prior notice. Then the commission scheduled a special meeting for this Friday. That meeting was postponed because Chief Ralph Black had to leave town for a funeral, according to Rose.
So a May 12 meeting was scheduled — still four days before the next pension fund board meeting.
Rose said he asked that the meeting be postponed again, to accommodate a request from Brantley’s firefighter union lawyer, Mickey Busca, who said he couldn’t be in town on the 12th. So now the commission is scheduled to meet on May 20, four days after the pension board meeting. If the Brantley pension request is heard by the pension board, he may no longer be employed by May 20.
Busca did not return repeated calls for comment for this story. Brantley referred calls to Hugh Keefe, who represented him in his appellate case.
Brantley has been sentenced to nine months in jail for offering money to co-workers to back up accusations he made against a fire department supervisor. Attorney Daniel Scholfield of the firm Lynch, Traub, Keefe & Errante has filed a petition for certification to the state Supreme Court on Brantley’s case to reopen his case. That’s considered a longshot, legally. Scholfield said Monday that the he’s arguing that state law, in conflict with federal constitutional law, “impermissibly permits convictions when there’s only a mere modicum of evidence.” In this case, Scholfield argued, the state “could not really offer evidence of how the supposed bribed witness was supposed to change his testimony” in return for money.
“We don’t think that Aaron is guilty in any way shape or form,” Scholfield said.
Beat The Clock
New Haven has been down this road before with employees who seek pensions when they lose their jobs after getting arrested for criminal activity — and then scramble to retire and obtain pensions before they are officially fired.
This past September a firefighter scrambled to put in for a disability pension before the Fire Commission met to fire him for posting a racist comment on Facebook. Before he got in trouble, he had been working without claiming he was too injured for duty.
The same was true for Aaron Brantley, which is why his application for the disability pension provoked outrage in some city government circles last week. Brantley didn’t put in the request for the disability pension until he lost his appeal on his conviction. Some people saw the request as an all-too-common attempt to game the system: A worker screws up, in this case heads to jail for committing a crime, and seeks to beat the termination clock to collect a lifetime jackpot that could cost taxpayers more than $1 million over time.
Others in city government were more sympathetic to the request. Some see Brantley as a tragic figure, a good firefighter with a largely unblemished record who made a mistake, then got caught up in larger disputes with the fire department. The state NAACP and the New Haven Firebirds, an organization of black New Haven firefighters, rallied in support of Brantley during his criminal case, accusing the department of racially railroading him. Then Brantley twice received terrible advice. He turned down an offer to accept accelerated rehabilitation rather than take his attempted bribery case to trial; if he had taken it, he would have avoided jail and kept his job. Then his attorney turned down a jury trial — where Brantley’s arguments about misbehavior by his boss might have fallen on sympathetic layman ears — in favor of having his fate decided by a judge, who focused on the facts of the law, as did the appellate court.
That sympathetic view may explain the curious timing of upcoming meetings, where Brantley’s financial fortunes will be determined.
If the city behaved like 90% of the rest of the world and changed retirement packages from Defined Benefit (pensions) to Defined Contribution (401K), we wouldn't have this problem.