Proposal includes $40,000 to $50,000 in pension payments
Gilroy – City council members have offered roughly $390,000 to former building official Rex E. Wyatt in hopes of warding off a potentially expensive lawsuit for wrongful termination, according to sources inside City Hall.
The sources, who requested anonymity because legal settlement discussions are not open to the public, said the offer included $40,000 to $50,000 in arrears for pension payments.
A superior court judge last October ordered the city to reinstate Wyatt, pay him for lost compensation and purge his personnel file of any mention of the sexual harassment charges that led to his 2003 termination. The ruling overturned decisions by four tiers of city officials, including City Council, to dismiss the former building official based on harassment charges by Carolyn Costa, a building permit technician who worked under Wyatt’s supervision. Costa, who lodged the complaint after Wyatt gave her a negative employee evaluation, has since left her job at the city.
The judge did not offer a detailed critique of the city’s handling of the matter but ruled that the “weight of evidence” did not support the decision to fire Wyatt. Since then, the city has been negotiating a settlement with the former building official in hopes of preventing another round of litigation.
It remains unclear if Wyatt will accept the $390,000 settlement offer or proceed with a suit alleging that the city violated his civil rights. His lawyer, Steven Fink, did not respond to several requests for comment late Friday. In the past, Fink has refused to disclose his client’s new address or to say if Wyatt would return to work if a settlement offer fell short of expectations.
Gilroy Community Development Director Wendie Rooney, who first recommended Wyatt’s termination following an internal investigation of the harassment charges, would not comment on the settlement since it is a personnel matter.
“I think that any time you have personnel issues … that result in an employee leaving,” she said, “it creates difficulty in the staff. … If indeed anything has been resolved, it’s a positive on all sides.”
Last November, councilmen shrouded their discussion of the case in complete secrecy by invoking a state law never before used in Gilroy. The move, also disclosed to the Dispatch by anonymous sources, came a month after the superior court ruling and inspired sharp criticism from one of the state’s leading champions of open government. Since then, council members have discussed the Wyatt suit in closed session, but have followed the more traditional practice of identifying the case on public meeting agendas.
Council members last discussed the Wyatt case at an Aug. 7 meeting.
“We would like to see this thing put to bed and put behind us,” Councilman Craig Gartman said. “This is not something that anybody wanted to get into. It was a series of things that occurred, and we would have loved to have settled it a while ago. For reasons I cannot discuss, it’s still hanging around.”
