Legal guns blazing: Response given in EEOC case

Travelers is paying all of the costs for the county’s defense after the county’s $10,000 policy deductible.

“That firm will be primarily responsible for the defense of the Brown, Ododa, and Gibbs complaints,” Davis said in an e-mail Monday.

The policy has a $2 million liability cap per year, according to operations development manager Bob Hohe.

GUNS BLAZING
Most of the EEOC claims filed by county employees over the past nine months have been related to the June 27, 2009 reductions in force that led to numerous layoffs, demotions and pay cuts.

But the complaints filed by Brown, Ododa and Gibbs specifically targeted two individuals – county commission chairman Danny Yearwood and department director Lyn Clement – for alleged patterns of gender and race discrimination.

Though their complaints were filed by an Atlanta employment law firm, their charges were limited to relatively brief first-person accounts of the alleged discrimination. Brown’s complaint was two pages long. Ododa and Gibbs each wrote seven paragraphs.

In his trio of responses, Mathis submitted more than 60 pages of legal arguments, most written with guns blazing.

Asking that the EEOC issue a “no-cause determination,” Mathis primarily targets Brown, whose complaints to the board of commissioners last October sparked the widely publicized and embarrassing controversy.

Mathis said Brown’s allegations were “false and contrived” and had been motivated solely by the fear that she would lose her job after Yearwood read in her personnel file a rebuttal she had written in response to disciplinary action taken against her several months earlier.

Mathis called that rebuttal letter “bogus” and said Brown “was clearly fearful for her job and brought the complaint against Chairman Yearwood as an offensive effort to hide her own misconduct and forestall any disciplinary action against her.”

Mathis said the county’s actions regarding the two African American employees – which included pay cuts, demotions and relocations of their offices and some changed job duties – had been done for legitimate business reasons to cut county expenses.

He said neither Ododa nor Gibbs had any first-hand knowledge of the use of racially derogatory language by Yearwood and Clement, both of whom have denied making such statements.

Rather, Mathis said, both employees had relied solely on what they had heard second hand from Brown, “whose credibility is highly suspect.”

RELIANCE ON EARLIER REPORT
Though his choice of words was stronger, Mathis’ defense of the county largely echoed the conclusions of the outside attorney the county hired initially to look into the validity of Brown’s 2009 allegations.

“Significantly, this independent review revealed no support whatsoever for any of these allegations,” Mathis wrote.

However, the scope of the investigation by Cartersville attorney David G. Archer was limited to seeing if he could find any corroboration for a limited number of allegations contained in three short written statements from Brown and her two HR employees.

Brown told the Barrow Journal months ago that she had had only minutes to compile her synopsis. The statements from her two employees were about a single encounter with Clement.

While Archer found the two HR employees credible, he also found Clement credible, leaving him to conclude that while Clement may have used a poor choice of words in reference to his displeasure with Ododa’s job performance, those comments had not been racially motivated.

Mathis also questioned why Brown, as an HR director, did not immediately report the alleged racist remarks by Yearwood or Clement.

He wrote that if Brown had an “honest, objective belief” that Ododa or Gibbs had been the targets of unlawful racial remarks, “she would have reported the conduct immediately and undertaken remedial efforts.”

As an experienced HR director, he added, Brown “would have known it was her responsibility to bring this situation to the Board’s attention immediately, document the complaints, obtain details regarding the nature of the supposed discriminatory conduct, and initiate a review of the allegations.”

He said she instead “waited to raise these baseless claims until she learned that Chairman Yearwood had discovered the disparaging comments she had made about him in her ‘secret rebuttal’ to the reprimand he had issued to her and believed her own job was in jeopardy.”

Mathis said Brown “couched her allegations of race discrimination in such generalized and conclusory terms as to make them as inflammatory as possible.”

Mathis said that in targeting Yearwood, Brown “ignores that the entire Board of Commissioners unanimously reviewed and approved all of the cost-saving measures that occurred in 2009, including all pay and personnel decisions.”

He noted that she has never suggested that the entire board is prejudiced.

While Mathis is correct in that Brown has never alleged that the entire BOC is prejudiced, he is incorrect in his assertion that the entire board unanimously approved all of the cost-saving measures last year.

According to the minutes of those meetings in January, March and June, there were very few unanimous votes.


WHAT’S NEXT
An attorney for Brown, Ododa and Gibbs said Monday that he would not comment on the ongoing legal matter.

Steven E. Wolfe of Buckley & Klein LLP said the three employees’ EEOC charges speak for themselves and that the EEOC’s consideration of their complaints is only the first step in the legal process.

“It’s a legal prerequisite to filing a Title VII lawsuit,” Wolfe said. “I will not comment on the substance of my client’s EEOC filings or on the county’s responses.”

County attorney Davis explained that the EEOC now would issue some type of finding and that the employees then would be permitted to pursue their claims in court.

While the EEOC has the option of conducting a more thorough investigation, which would include a site visit, she said that is not the norm.

“Typically, they rely on the documentation presented in furtherance of the issues.”