A Black fire official’s legal fight against Charlotte ends, but emotions still raw
A bitter and long-running legal fight over whether the Charlotte Fire Department discriminated against a high-ranking Black employee has been settled before trial — for $175,000.
Thus, the central question of the 4-year-old federal dispute — whether the fire department and the City of Charlotte denied former Battalion Chief Willie Summers multiple promotions due to his race — will go unanswered.
Meanwhile, a similar lawsuit filed by two other Black fire department employees is scheduled for trial on Sept. 9. Other complaints against the department involving discrimination, retaliation and other employment claims continue to move through state and federal courts.
In the case of Summers, now fire chief in Asheboro, all that remains is the question of his attorneys’ fees and costs. Given the length of the litigation, the requested amount could reach $500,000 or more.
Left behind: a case file dating back to 2018, stuffed with thousands of pages of legal documents mapping out the opposing lines in protracted trench warfare.
Even after the settlement, emotions remained raw.
In an interview with The Charlotte Observer on Thursday, Summers’ attorney Meg Maloney accused the city and its defense team of “playing games” with the timing of their offer.
“If someone is going to send an offer, they do it either before discovery starts or the day after an unsuccessful mediation. They don’t send it (only) days before the start of trial,” she said.
“If you care about diversity and inclusion and having your best people in place, you don’t fight your best people for four years. In a lot of people’s opinions, Willie Summers should be the fire chief right now.”
In a statement released on Friday through Kathleen Lucchesi, its lead attorney in the Summers case, the City of Charlotte dismissed Maloney’s claim of game playing as “patently false.”
“While not required to do so, the City made an Offer of Judgment 14 days before the start of the Summers trial as allowed under the federal rules,” the statement said. “Mr. Summers waited until the Friday before trial to accept that offer. In fact, the City made several other attempts leading up to the July 12 trial to settle the case, including as late as May 26, to which Mr. Summers did not respond.”
The city, according to its statement, “values diversity and inclusion and works to hire and promote qualified people. In the case of Mr. Summers, he was one of a pool of candidates who met the baseline qualifications for the promotional position and could have been successful in the job.”
Court twice sanctions city
In court filings, the city has denied all allegations of wrongdoing. Its lawyers say race was never a factor in the jobs Summers failed to get, and that the candidates ultimately selected were fully qualified.
However, the city was twice sanctioned by the court for repeatedly failing to produce records relevant to why Summers — who spent 32 years with the department, the last 19 as a battalion chief — was passed over for three promotions in 2015-16.
“The City failed to follow the law, failed to follow the EEOC Guidelines, failed to follow its own processes and policies, failed to require documentation of the relevant decisions, failed to preserve documentation, and allowed the manipulation of the promotional processes to promote less qualified white candidates over ... Willie Summers,” Maloney argued in a pretrial filing summarizing her case.
“This is not a case about quotas or affirmative action; it is a case about the City of Charlotte that allowed the Fire Department to discriminate against Willie Summers on the basis of race.”
According to Lucchesi’s statement, the city produced more than 120,000 pages of documents – “including promotional testing documents from 2006 to 2020 in response to more than 200+ specific requests for documents and information from Mr. Summers.”
The plaintiffs’ requests “demanded records dating back to 2004 even though the claims made by the plaintiffs were from 2015 to 2019.”
Passed over several times
In 2015, Summers applied for a promotion to deputy chief. The first selection process was thrown out. The second led to the selection of a white male candidate to fill the job.
In their own trial brief, the city’s attorneys said Summers tied for 12th among the 15 candidates in the competition for the deputy chief’s job.
Later that year, Summers also applied for one of the five newly created jobs for division chief. He had the fifth-highest score on the assessment test, but then-Chief Jon Hannan picked a white male with a lower score for the fifth slot, according to Maloney’s filing. Overall, the jobs were filled by three white men, a white female and one Black man.
In May 2016, Summers filed for the special fire department assignment of health and safety officer. The job went to the other candidate, a white female.
That July, Summers filed a complaint against Hannan claiming that the job-selection processes were improperly handled and that the chief had retaliated against him. Hannan handled Summers’ complaint and dismissed it. His decision was later backed by the City Manager’s Office.
In May 2018, Summers filed his discrimination and retaliation lawsuit against the city. It was moved to federal court that November, shortly after Summers left the department to take the Asheboro chief’s job.
Summers did not respond to an Observer email or voicemail Thursday seeking comment.
The city made its “offer of judgment” to settle the case two weeks before the scheduled start this month of the lawsuit trial.
In her filing, Lucchesi said the offer was not an admission of liability or that the city acted unlawfully or had damaged Summers in any way.
Discovery process
Throughout the pretrial “discovery” process, in which the opposing sides are required to share evidence to be used during the trial, the city repeatedly came under fire for failing to produce requested documents about the fire department’s hirings despite seven court orders to do so.
In an affidavit filed in support of Maloney’s second request for sanctions, Raleigh lawyer Laura Wetsch criticized the city’s “reckless attitude toward discovery.”
“I am frankly appalled by the extreme level of obstruction and obfuscation by the (city) in its responses to discovery and in its responses to the Court’s orders,” she wrote.
Wetsch said the city’s goal was either to avoid handing over relevant evidence or to “unnecessarily increase the costs of litigation to the detriment of the plaintiffs.”
In its statement on Friday, the city denied it had abused the discovery process.
“There were documents the City couldn’t locate, but the City did not withhold or destroy documents to avoid producing them nor did it try to run up the cost of litigation,” according to its statement.
However, in his February ruling handing down sanctions, U.S. District Judge Bob Conrad said the city had failed in its duty to produce or preserve documents from the job searches that it knew it would need in court.
“Here, the city was under a duty to preserve documents as of July 2016,” the judge wrote. “The City also repeatedly failed to participate in the discovery process and failed to comply when compelled and sanctioned by the Court.”
Conrad said the city’s “repeated derelictions” to preserve or produce the relevant documents is proof of “an intent to deprive Plaintiffs of the information.”
Had the case gone to trial, Conrad would have shared that finding with the jury, potentially damaging the city’s credibility from the start.
Allegations of racial discrimination, retaliation and other misconduct within the fire department’s leadership date back decades.
In 2017, a federal jury awarded a former Charlotte fire inspector $1.5 million after she claimed she was fired for publicly complaining about the conditions of a building in which inspectors were forced to work.
Maloney also was the attorney in that case.
This story was originally published July 29, 2022 at 11:38 AM.
