Thomas Breen file photo
Marcus Paca, on the campaign stump in 2017.
A federal appeals court has upheld a lower court’s decision that former Mayor Toni Harp did not discriminate against former Labor Relations Director Marcus Paca when she fired him in 2016 for alleged insubordination.
A panel of three judges from the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit issued that decision Friday in the case Marcus Paca v. City of New Haven.
The decision comes almost exactly one year after a federal district court ruled in Sept. 2019 in favor of the city and against Paca in the latter’s federal lawsuit, which was first filed in Sept. 2016.
The suit alleged that Harp fired Paca in April 2016 as retaliation for the conduct of his wife, Mendi Blue. Blue is also a former top city official and was also fired by Harp towards the beginning of the former mayor’s second term. (She, too, sued over her firing. She and the city reached a $200,000 settlement before that case went to trial.)
The three federal judges—Ralph Winter, Reena Raggi, and Denny Chin—agreed with U.S. District Court Judge Dominic Squatrito’s decision from a year ago that Paca did not prove in his federal lawsuit that Harp fired him for any reason other than his own actions at City Hall.
“Thus, despite the fact that Paca and his wife were terminated within a day of each other, this evidence was plainly insufficient to create a factual dispute that Paca’s termination was caused by anything other than his own unsatisfactory conduct,” the judges wrote.
Paca’s lawyer, Steve Jacobs, told the Independent Tuesday afternoon that the appeals court’s decision is not a finding on the merits of the case. “It was simply a determination as to whether there was sufficient evidence in the record below to warrant a different outcome” than the summary judgment first issued by Squatrito.
“What it doesn’t mean is that the city was right in firing Marcus,” Jacobs reiterated. When asked about his and his clients’ next steps on the matter, Jacobs said, “We’re exploring our options.”
The federal appeals court decision brings to an end a lawsuit that has wound its way through the federal court system for the past four years.
Paca, who is also a former Edgewood alder and who ran for mayor against Harp in 2017, accused the then-administration of terminating his position as labor relations director because of Blue’s writing of a whistle-blowing memo to the Board of Alders about the alleged improper awarding of grant writing contracts to a political ally of Harp’s.
The Harp Administration contended that the mayor fired Paca because he allegedly leaked confidential emails to the press and to a city employee union about the city’s firing of former Commission on Equal Opportunities Executive Director Nichole Jefferson.
“Here, the City adduced evidence that Paca was fired because Harp came to believe that Paca had instructed his administrative assistant to provide privileged emails to the union, and then lied to her about it, breaching her trust,” the three appeals court judges wrote.
“Although Paca maintained that the actual reason for his firing was retaliation for his wife’s protected speech, he did not introduce any competent evidence that his wife had engaged in protected speech, or that her speech was casually connected to his termination.”
The 2019 decision lays out the facts, accusations, rebuttals, and City Hall turmoil that form the core of Paca’s lawsuit. Click here to download that 2019 decision, and here to download the appeals court’s recent upholding of that earlier ruling.
A city spokesperson declined to comment for this story.
