City Administrator Deborah Edgerly's lawsuit has cost Oakland $368,000 in legal fees.
Posted on 09/26/2011 9:25:50 AM PDT by SmithL
Cash-strapped Oakland has spent nearly $1 million and counting on outside lawyers to defend the city's decision to fire former City Administrator Deborah Edgerly and her top assistant, Cheryl Thompson.
Edgerly and Thompson were both fired in 2008 by then-Mayor Ron Dellums after Edgerly was accused of warning her nephew William Lovan, a convicted felon who worked for the city as a parking meter repairman, of a planned police gang sweep.
Lovan resigned from the city last September after his arrest for drug possession. At the time, he was on home detention for a gun conviction - and soon after was sentenced to 16 months in state prison for violating parole.
Edgerly and Thompson were both at-will employees and served at the mayor's pleasure, so they could be fired without cause.
The two fought back, however, filing separate lawsuits claiming sex discrimination. They also claimed that the real reason they had been shown the door was their refusal to go along with Dellums' use of city money to pay for a new office for his wife, who was acting as a City Hall adviser, and for refusing to use city money to pay for a trip Dellums took to South Africa a year after he took office.
Thompson also claimed that Edgerly had promised her a severance package when she signed on as her $216,000-a-year assistant.
The San Francisco law firm Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, which was brought in to defend the city, has so far billed Oakland $571,000 in Thompson's case and $368,000 in Edgerly's - at an average of $400 an hour.
City Attorney Barbara Parker felt the city could win both cases. But a majority of the City Council decided last week that it was time to cut its losses and pay Thompson $500,000 to go away.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
Oakland voters created their little workers paradise, and now they can live with the consequences.
Please fire me Oakland. I’ll only charge half the price.
Hey Oakland. If you are curious why you are circling the drain, the figure $216K and the term "Assistant" generally don't go together.
This woman is lower than slime.
Jerry Brown hired her? California Democrats....they give thieves a bad name.
No problem.....it’s just government money.
It would have been cheaper to just have them...
Nevermind!
At-will employees who can’t be fired.
They must have some really good lawyers...better than the City of Oakland anyway.
I guess the only way California will wake up is when the firetrucks can’t come because they’re out of fuel. There’ll be plenty of firefighters, just no fuel for the trucks.
It would have been cheaper to hire the Soprano Crew.
These ‘severance’ packages sound like a prelude to blackmail.
Scrap the whole system and start over.
Once they fired her, I doubt she attended any more staff or board meetings.
That being the case, even if it costs $1,000,000 to get rid of her, I think the city will save enough money in one year, two years tops, to cover their expenses.
(assuming the current federal rate of $16 per muffin served at meetings).
Maybe they should start firing some of the judges who are presiding over these cases.
Of course, that would presume that the guys in charge were trying to clean things up. But they need crooked judges in order to pull off crooked deals.
Mayor Dellums? I’d be inclined to say it’s probably true that he fired her because she refused to pay his wife or his vacation expenses.
The answers are to streamline and shorten the discovry process, to increase the power of judges to rule summarily (effectively reducing the number of cases that go to out of control juries), and to reduce or eliminate the concept of protected classes of employees.
Good GOD! that woman brings a whole new level to ugly.
profoundly guilty!
The point is the city lawyers can’t terminate AT WILL employees that should have been let go when Red Dellums left office.
Unless Moonbeam hired them back on when he was mayor.
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