Adonijah Oldacre was fired from his job as parts room supervisor at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in December, and has been desperate to plead his case for reinstatement to the Atlanta Civil Service Board in the six months since.
“We’re talking about my livelihood,” Oldacre said of his $47,000-a-year job. “I have a wife and four kids, and not getting that hearing has put a lot of hardship on us, especially on the marriage. We’re really pinching pennies.”
Twenty-three other cases have also languished without a hearing, in apparent violation of a city code that requires appeals to be heard within 60 days, the The Atlanta Journal-Constitution found in a review of the board’s record. In fact, the civil service board had gone seven months without considering a single case until last week, according to documents obtained by the AJC.
Mary Huber says a seven-month break in civil service hearings is unprecedented in recent history, and she would know: Huber represented employees before the board for the past 10 years, and worked in the city’s law department from 1991-2000. She stopped handling civil service cases in early 2015.
“I’ve never heard of a situation like this,” Huber said. “At some point, there is a denial of due process. The lawyers and the unions need to be raising hell.”
Employees who win their cases have the disciplinary actions overturned, and get back-pay for the time they missed from work. Terminated employees get back their jobs.
City officials told the AJC that the board didn’t meet because they needed time to replace board members whose terms had expired; the mayor’s office is responsible for board appointments.
But two board members resigned in August, without the city moving to replace them until this year. In addition, board members Gloria Leonard and Bartlett Hargro, who resigned Dec. 31, had served on expired terms since 2010 — Mayor Kasim Reed’s first year in office.
Leonard and board chairman T.J. Middlebrooks, whose term expired in September, said they’d been kept in the dark about the suspension of their work, and questioned the city’s explanation.
“We could have had hearings all along,” Leonard said. “And I just think how low-down and dirty the city is to some of these employees.”
City slow to fill vacancies
Atlanta Human Resources Commissioner Yvonne Yancy, whose department is responsible for Civil Service Board operations, said the city’s law department advised her that the delay in hearing cases is legal, so long as employees get one eventually and any back-pay goes “back to the date of the (disciplinary) action.” She called it an “appropriate remedy,” and said there is a written opinion on the matter but declined to give it to the newspaper because of attorney-client privilege.
“The issue was that we had some members who had expired terms and two indicated they were resigning … so I would not have a full compliment of board members,” Yancy said. “We wouldn’t have full panels. (So) a decision was made to pause to allow the appointments to take place.”
The board actually did have enough members to fully staff hearings, if the city had allowed Leonard and Middlebrooks to continue hearing cases with board member Samika Boyd while the administration found replacements. A panel of three members is required to hear the most severe disciplinary cases; many cases require just one board member.
Yancy said that Leonard, who served on the board since 2001, had been told verbally that she was being replaced. But when contacted by a reporter last week, Leonard said the city hadn’t told her anything about her status on the board.
“They’ve just been lazy, kind of sloppin’ along and not trying to find anybody,” Leonard said.
Middlebrooks said he was notified late last year that hearings for November and December were cancelled, then didn’t hear anything afterward. A Dec. 2 email to Middlebrooks said the cancellations were due to “various administrative concerns,” and scheduling would resume in mid-January. It never did.
“I assumed that the city had the right to do whatever it was that they were doing,” said Middlebrooks, who has been reappointed to the board. “Maybe that’s bad to assume, but I received no information. To this day I don’t know exactly what was done.”
When pressed on why hearings didn’t continue, a spokeswoman for Reed’s office said the new appointments were “critical.”
“As of December 2015, we had one active member … and two expired members,” spokeswoman Anne Torres said. “It was reasonable to have concerns the board would not be able to function and new appointments were critical.”
But the city made the opposite argument in 2012, when Huber, the attorney who represented employees before the board, filed a court action asking that the board be disqualified from hearing cases because each of the five members' terms had expired. Those board members included Middlebrooks, Leonard and Hargro.
Yancy told the AJC at the time that the board members had agreed to continue serving until they were replaced or reappointed: “We have a thoughtful process to review current members while also considering other nominations.”
When asked to respond to the contradicting arguments, Torres said last week that the city “has full authority to make new appointments when it deems appropriate…After time, it makes sense to appoint new members.”
Official pledges timely hearings
Last week’s hearing, the first since Nov. 6, was over a one-day suspension and required one board member to hear it. Two more hearings are scheduled in June, both of which require a single board member.
One person raising significant ruckus about the hearing delays is Gwen Gillespie, a former city employee and union rep who now represents city employees in private practice. Gillespie is handling the Oldacre appeal, and won two cases against the city in a five-day period late last year. One involved a high-profile termination of an employee accused of stealing copper wire and selling it for scrap.
Board hearings were suspended shortly after those rulings.
“It is extremely offensive to me to continue to ask my clients to recognize the policies of the city when the people placed in charge of those policies disregard them,” Gillespie said. “Meanwhile, someone is losing their home, someone is losing their livelihood. How can you tell employees that they violated a code, then turn around and violate a code against them?”
Yancy said she can’t explain why it took so long to appoint new board members. But she said the Reed administration recognizes the importance of the civil service board.
“We believe that every employee is entitled to due process regarding personnel matters,” Yancy said. “With four new appointees, we are confident that the board will meet on a regular basis going forward.”
More reading on Atlanta’s Civil Service Board:
- The Civil Service Board in 2011 reinstated three police officers accused of lying in federal court.
- Attorney Mary Huber filed a 2012 court action to disqualify the Civil Service Board from hearing cases because all of its members were serving on expired terms.
- Public Works employee Oscar Dawson is reinstated earlier this year after winning his Civil Service Board hearing.
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