City Corporation Counsel Patricia King at City Hall Tuesday.
Will a judge’s decision ordering the acting police chief to vacate her position affect any other interim city department heads?
No, according to the city’s top attorney, who read Monday’s decision — which the Elicker Administration still plans on appealing — as applying narrowly to New Haven’s police chief only.
City Corporation Counsel Patricia King offered that take Tuesday during a press conference with Mayor Justin Elicker on the second floor of City Hall.
King and Elicker said that Monday’s decision from state Superior Court Judge Michael Kamp in the state court case Bosie Kimber v. Renee Dominguez applies only to the position of police chief.
“As far as we’re concerned, the trial court’s ruling was on the case before it, which had to do with the police chief,” King said Tuesday. “To the extent that issues are raised regarding any other city employee or mayoral appointee, we would deal with that challenge if it comes.”
The mayor and top city attorney hosted the press conference one day after a state judge sided with Newhallville Rev. Boise Kimber’s reading of the city charter, and ordered Acting Police Chief Renee Dominguez to vacate her position. Elicker and King’s press conference Tuesday afternoon also came several hours after Kimber and several other clergy hosted a presser of their own, at which they urged the mayor to respect the judge’s decision and drop the planned appeal.
At Tuesday’s City Hall presser, Elicker and King doubled down on their commitment to appeal Judge Michael Kamp’s decision. “In our view, the trial court decision was very narrow and disregarded certain parts of the charter,” King said, including what she said was a requirement that department heads “stay in office until their replacement is found and qualified.”
“We have a different reading of the charter than the trial judge does,” she added. “An appeal is every litigant’s right.”
She said the city has 20 days from when Kamp’s decision came out on Monday to file an appeal. She said the city hasn’t filed that appeal yet, and plans to do so within the necessary timeline.
Elicker and Kinganswered a number of questions Tuesday that some Independent commenters have raised about potential legal ramifications of Kamp’s decision.
For example, does this decision have any impact on any other acting city department heads? Or is this just about the police chief?
“Our assessment is that the judge’s ruling was specifically about this case,” and therefore only about the police chief position and Dominguez’s current occupying that role in an acting capacity, Elicker said.
Indeed, Kamp’s decision appears to focus pretty narrowly on the police chief position.
One such example of the judge’s ruling focusing on the city’s top law enforcement official comes on the ruling’s seventh page. “Although there are some mechanisms in the city charter that allow a temporary appointee to remain in office for more than six months,” he wrote, “(i.e., the Board of Alders has thirty days to act on the mayor’s nomination and a rejected nominee can keep the position until her name is resubmitted for consideration at the next Board of Alders meeting), the clear import of the city charter is that an acting police chief cannot remain in place indefinitely.”
Another example comes in the portions of the charter that the judge chooses to quote directly in his decision. He writes on pages five and six of the order:
“Article VI § 3(1)(1) of the New Haven charter provides in relevant part: ‘The following Appointed Public Officials shall be appointed by the Mayor, subject to approval by the Board of Alders, as set forth in § 1.A (3) of Article IV of this Charter … (b) Chief of Police … who shall serve subject to the authority of the Mayor.’ Article IV § 1.A (3) provides in relevant part that the Board of Alders ‘shall approve the following appointees of the Mayor … (a) Chief of Police … as set forth in § 3.A (1) Article VI of this Charter. Pending acting by the board, which shall be completed within thirty (3) days of the submission of the nomination, a proposed appointee to a position may perform the duties and exercise the powers of the position; although this provision shall not be applicable to appointees to boards or commissions. A rejected nominee may continue in office in an acting capacity pending resubmission of the candidate’s name for approval at the board’s next regular meeting; however, a person’s name may not [be] submitted more than two (2) times. Other than to members on a Board or Commission, the Mayor may designate an individual to hold a position in an acting capacity pending the selection of a nominee, but no person may hold such a position for more than six (6) months without being submitted for confirmation by the board.’ ”
Click here to read Kamp’s order in full.
The words that Kamp left out of his quotations of Article IV § 1.A (3) of the charter state that that Board of Alders approval requirement and the six-month time limit for acting picks apply not just to the police chief role, but also to that of the fire chief and “up to four (4) Coordinators.”
City spokesperson Lenny Speiller told the Independent after Tuesday’s presser that, while the charter allows the mayor to appoint up to four coordinators, there are currently only three: Community Services Administrator Mehul Dalal, Chief Administrative Officer Regina Rush-Kittle, and Economic Development Administrator Mike Piscitelli. He said none of those three are currently serving in an “acting” capacity. Fire Chief John Alston is also not serving in an “acting” role.
Mayor Elicker at Tuesday's presser.
The mayor was asked on Tuesday if this section of the charter needs to be revised and clarified in the upcoming once-a-decade charter revision process.
After all, the city’s and Kimber’s diverging interpretations of this section of the charter — and its apparent “silences” on what should happen when a police chief candidate is rejected by the alders but stays on in an acting capacity anyway — form the core of the lawsuit.
“I think that there are multiple places in the charter where there is language that is not entirely clear,” Elicker said Tuesday. “There could be work here as well.”
An appeal in this case could take 6 months to a year, during which time a new Chief of Police could be appointed and approved by the Board of Alders. In that case the Court would likely rule the matter moot in that there is no issue to decide.
The Charter must be fixed.
I hope Attorney King herself is reviewing the Charter to identify all areas that may be unclear or insufficient.