Paul Bass pre-pandemic photo
Jefferson: returning to City Hall.
Former city fair-hiring chief Nichole Jefferson has won her job back — along with roughly $300,000 in back pay — thanks to a State Supreme Court ruling that ends a legal dispute that spanned over five years and two mayoral administrations.
The state’s highest court issued that unanimous decision, written by Justice Christine Keller, on Thursday in the case City of New Haven v. AFSCME, Council 4, Local 3144 (SC 20362).
The court affirmed an April 2018 state Board of Mediation and Arbitration decision and an April 2019 state Superior Court decision, thereby ordering the Elicker Administration to do what the former Harp Administration resisted for years.
The court ordered the city to reinstate Jefferson to her prior role as executive director of the city’s Commission on Equal Opportunities (CEO), which enforces the city ordinance that requires the hiring of Black, Latino, and female workers and minority-owned and female-headed firms on government-funded construction projects. Former Mayor Toni Harp fired Jefferson from that position in August 2015 over transparency and ethical concerns.
The top court’s decision also ordered the city to pay Jefferson back pay and other contractually-required benefits covering the period from Aug. 1, 2017, through the date she is formally rehired by City Hall.
Justice Keller’s ruling technically applies to a 2019 appeal the city filed in response to the lower court’s finding in favor of Jefferson’s award. In that appeal, the former Harp Administration argued that rehiring Jefferson would violate public policies concerning bribery and conflicts of interest.
The Supreme Court ultimately disagreed, and refused to vacate the 2018 award.
“I feel wonderful. I feel very happy with the decision,” Jefferson told the Independent Friday afternoon. Jefferson has consistently denied all allegations made against her by the former Harp Administration.
Simon Bazelon pre-pandemic photo
Jefferson (left) with Elicker on the campaign trail in 2019.
Mayor Justin Elicker, who inherited the Supreme Court appeal and the five-and-a-half year legal case from former Mayor Toni Harp’s administration, said that the city “will be abiding by the court’s decision and working to facilitate the payment in back wages and the reinstatement of Nichole’s employment with the city.”
“I’ve always enjoyed working with Nichole, and look forward to working with her again,” he said.
Elicker said that, when he first came into office a little over a year ago, his administration was open to settling the case with Jefferson. Jefferson campaigned for Elicker against her former boss during the 2019 mayoral race.
“However, the amount of money she was asking for for the settlement was way beyond what was responsible for us to agree to,” Elicker said, “and way beyond the amount the court is requiring the city to pay.”
He said the city’s current estimate as to how much it owes Jefferson in back pay and benefits is around $300,000 in total. He said that Jefferson had sought a settlement payment of $2.9 million.
In a statement sent by text message to the Independent Friday afternoon, Jeff Bagnell, Jefferson’s personal attorney, wrote, “We are happy with the Court’s decision and Nichole being vindicated a third time. Now she needs to be made whole after a five year campaign to unjustly defame her.”
Bagnell also said that the $300,000 calculation offered by the mayor is lower than what Jefferson should receive in back pay when reinstated.
“After years of legal proceedings and consecutive appeals, Ms Jefferson’s total back pay and pension losses are far more substantial than the Mayor notes,” he wrote. “Moreover, the notion that she can now come back to her desk after five years of traumatizing, scorched earth litigation is absurd, as every experienced labor and employment attorney knows. The case law makes this clear. Front pay and reinstatement, legally, are two sides of the same coin. It is now time for a global, and permanent, resolution of this politically motivated destruction of a stellar employee’s reputation.”
“Egregious,” But Not “Incorrigible”
Keller’s 24-page written opinion, which can be read in full here, details the past five-plus years of legal wrangling between Jefferson and the city.
Each step of the way, the courts and state arbitrators found that the former Harp Administration should have resorted to “progressive discipline” rather than outright firing of Jefferson back in 2015. As the city persisted in its attempts to uphold its decision to fire her, the courts kept ruling in Jefferson’s favor.
Jefferson was employed by the city from March 1996 through August 2015.
“During that time,” Keller wrote, “she enjoyed an excellent employment record, won various awards and was promoted five times, the last time, in 2001, to the position of executive director of the commission.”
Click here and here and here to read extensive background on the allegations that led to Jefferson’s firing, and on Jefferson’s pushback and claims that the Harp Administration was unduly tarnishing her reputation.
Keller recounts how the arbitration board ultimately upheld only three of the 11 claims put forward by the city as to why it fired Jefferson in the first place.
Those three factual claims, which the city made and the arbitration board, Superior Court, and Supreme Court all upheld, were:
• That Jefferson did not have city authorization, nor did she disclose to the city, that she had formed in Connecticut a separate consulting company that advertised contract compliance services — regarding the same rules she was charged with enforcing in her city role as head of CEO. The existence of that separate company “led to the appearance of impropriety and a conflict of interest as defined and argued by the city.” In her defense, the panel found no evidence that Jefferson ever provided any such services in Connecticut or ever intended to deceive the city about her company’s existence.
• That Jefferson failed to comply with former Economic Development Administrator Matthew Nemerson’s May 2015 request for information related to City Hall’s investigation of her office, and therefore she “did not cooperate with the investigation,” as required by the Local 3144 collective bargaining agreement. In her defense, the panel found that Jefferson was simply following the union’s advice when she did not comply with Nemerson’s request.
• And that, in 2008, Jefferson issued four letters under her signature in which she sought donations for the Construction Workforce Initiative 2, a program created by the city to provide training and employment opportunities in the construction industry for low-income city residents, from the same contractors whose employment practices she was charged with enforcing. While this was a legitimate fundraising activity per city law, the panel found, “it was improper for her to solicit them in lieu of fines” — which the city accused her of doing. In her defense, the panel found that soliciting donations in lieu of fines was not tantamount to bribery, and that there is no evidence showing that Jefferson ever personally benefitted from those four memoranda signed in her name.
While Jefferson did disregard a city attorney’s advice not to solicit donations in lieu of fines from companies whose practices she oversaw, and while Jefferson did form a private company that “ran afoul of the city’s conflict of interest laws,” the arbitration panel found that the city authorized Jefferson to solicit donations from said companies and it did allow her to perform consulting work for one of those companies in New York.
“Thus, the city is hardly blameless in this matter,” Keller wrote. Indeed, it is evident that the city’s own policies and decision making at critical junctures created for Jefferson an ethical tightrope that could only end in the ethical lapses and errors of judgment of which the city now complains”.
Keller ultimately agreed with the Superior Court’s findings that, to quote Superior Court Judge James Wilson Abrams, “While the court finds that there was actual harm sufficient to consider the behavior at issue egregious,’’ there was ‘‘insufficient support for the argument that … Jefferson would not respond appropriately to progressive workplace discipline, and, as a result, [the court] cannot find her ‘incorrigible.’”
In the end, Keller wrote, Jefferson’s actions, “though serious, were not so egregious” to merit her firing.
The Supreme Court justices noted that the arbitration award effectively docked Jefferson two years worth of pay — from August 2015 through August 2017. That decision in and of itself sends “a powerful message to other municipal employees and the public at large that similar conduct will not be tolerated.”
Keller also emphasized that, in Jefferson’s nearly two decades of city employment, she “enjoyed a spotless employment record and was cited on several occasions for her high ethical standards.”
If the city wishes to fire employees like Jefferson for what the city proved she did, then it should negotiate with the relevant city unions to include such provisions in collective bargaining agreements.
“Until such time, however, the employer must abide by the arbitrators’ determinations regarding just cause and the appropriate remedy for that conduct.”
Congratulations to Nicole. Sounds like a just decision by the CT Supreme Court, including the admonition that City administrations should follow the progressive discipline practices it establishes in its union contracts. (For those of you who like to opine that union contracts don't allow you to discipline or fire someone, I can tell you as a former city department head if you (a) have just cause, (b) follow the steps, (c) have competent assistance from someone in the labor relations department, you can successfully fire employees who deserve to be fired. And when you do, the 98% of the people who work for you appreciate it.)