By MAXINE BERNSTEIN/The Oregonian/OregonLive
A federal jury has awarded a former Toledo city recorder fired eight years ago more than $1 million in a verdict against the city for retaliating against her as a whistleblower who reported mismanagement, waste and abuse of authority.
Nancy Bryant had worked for the city as its recorder for 13 years before then-city manager, Craig Martin, fired her in 2017. The former mayor, Billie Jo Smith, supported her termination. Smith and two other city council members were recalled by voters in September 2018 and Martin resigned in 2019.
Bryant’s lawyer, Beth Creighton, said the city manager treated Bryant as his personal secretary and lashed out at her when she disagreed with him or his policies regarding the use of taxpayer money.
Andrew Campbell, an attorney for Toledo’s insurance carrier, CIS Oregon, said Bryant took “grave offense” when the city manager believed part of Bryant’s job was to assist him and he asked her to open and sort his incoming mail. What followed was five months of “non-stop insubordination” by Bryant, including “eye rolls, loud sighs, and “verbal challenges,” Campbell wrote in court documents.
Bryant complained to then-mayor Smith about Martin’s behavior in 2017, which triggered an outside consultant’s “360 evaluation” of management in the city, according to court records.
Bryant’s lawyer said Martin responded by looking for any slip-up to fire Bryant instead of following some of the review’s recommendations. Martin, for example, asked other department heads to “secretly document” their interactions with Bryant, and Bryant ended up reporting his “insulting and abusive behavior” toward her and others to the City Council, according to court records.
“I am trying to survive in a difficult workplace environment where conversations with the City Manager quickly become personal attacks,” she wrote. “I cannot go to the City Manager for fear of retaliation.”
In city meetings, Bryant had opposed Martin’s push to keep the city’s pool open as a conflict of interest, Creighton said. Martin, an avid swimmer and coach of a local girls team, supported creating an independent district to manage the pool and provide $165,000 in city funding for it, according to Creighton. Bryant also said the city couldn’t afford Martin’s push to buy a bank building and renovate it for a new police station for $3.1 million, according to Creighton.
Voters agreed in 2017 to establish the Greater Toledo Pool and Recreation District to take ownership and operation of the city’s public pool after the city determined it could no longer afford to do so.
Consultants brought in
Another outside consultant was hired to review city management, but this time Smith complained to consultant Jill Goldsmith that Bryant and some other staff had been “attacking” the city manager since he took the job.
Bryant felt Goldsmith was “hostile and adversarial” and approached the inquiry with a “predetermined outcome,” according to Creighton’s trial memorandum. Goldsmith found Bryant had asked a city information technology worker to remove the city manager’s access to what was called a “recorder assist” file on a city drive, according to Creighton.
Bryant said she did so because Martin had obtained the wrong mission statement for the city by looking in the archived record file, which mainly held working documents used by Bryant and the assistant city recorder.
Martin claimed that Bryant was concealing city information from him, according to Campbell, the attorney for the city. Creighton, however, argued that Goldsmith never gave Bryant a chance to explain why she cut off Martin’s access.
Within two weeks of Goldsmith’s report, Martin put Bryant on notice that he intended to fire her, claiming she was unwilling to communicate with him, accusing her of interfering with his ability to do his job and for her “dishonesty in hiding documents” from him, according to Campbell.
Martin fired Bryant a week later, according to court records.
A group of Toledo residents then moved to recall the mayor and urged her to fire Martin, according to court papers. Smith, in turn, described Bryant as a “disgruntled former employee,” according to a mailer she distributed.
A federal jury in Eugene deliberated for about five hours after a three-day trial before U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken and last week ordered the city of Toledo to pay $1,090,000 to Bryant, Martin to pay her $115,000 and Smith to pay her $75,000.
CIS Oregon, which insures most city and county governments in the state, is on the hook to pay the judgement, should Aiken agree that the amount is justified. CIS Oregon will also have to decide whether to appeal, Toledo officials told Lincoln Chronicle on Tuesday.
The jury found Martin and Smith violated Bryant’s First Amendment right to be free from retaliation for speaking on an issue of public concern and awarded her an additional $10,000 in emotional damages for Martin’s retaliation and $5,000 in emotional damages for Smith’s retaliation.
The jury also granted punitive damages of another $12,000 against Martin and $1,000 against Smith for engaging in either malicious conduct or a reckless disregard of Bryant’s rights. The total damages awarded add up to $1.3 million.
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