Angulo-Alvarez v. Aponte de la Torre, ANGULO-ALVAREZ

• Decision Date: 05 November 1998
• Docket Number: ANGULO-ALVAREZ,No. 98-1587,98-1587
• Citation: 170 F.3d 246
• Parties: Manuel, et al., Plaintiffs-Appellants, v. Jose E. APONTE DE LA TORRE, et al., Defendants-Appellees. . Heard
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — First Circuit

Page 246

170 F.3d 246

Manuel ANGULO-ALVAREZ, et al., Plaintiffs-Appellants, v. Jose E. APONTE DE LA TORRE, et al., Defendants-Appellees.

No. 98-1587.

United States Court of Appeals, First Circuit.

Heard Nov. 5, 1998.

Decided March 19, 1999.

Jess M. Hernandez-Sanchez for appellants.

Luis E. Pabn-Roca for appellee Municipality of Carolina and Jose E. Aponte in his Official Capacity as Mayor, Leticia Casalduc-Rabell, Assistant Solicitor General, U.S. Department of Justice for appellee Jose E. Aponte, Mayor of Carolina, in his individual capacity, with whom Carlos Lugo-Fiol, Solicitor General, U.S. Department of Justice and Edda Serrano-Blasini, Deputy Solicitor General, U.S. Department of Justice, were on brief.

Before TORRUELLA, Chief Judge, HALL, ^* Senior Circuit Judge, and LIPEZ, Circuit Judge.

LIPEZ, Circuit Judge.

Manuel Angulo-Alvarez and twelve of his former coworkers at the Department of Maintenance and Transportation of the Municipality of Carolina, Puerto Rico ("the Department"), appeal from a district court judgment dismissing their political discrimination claims against the Municipality of Carolina and its Mayor, Jose E. Aponte ("Mayor Aponte"). We affirm.

I. Background

The plaintiffs are former career employees of the Municipality of Carolina who worked in the Department. They are also members of the New Progressive Party ("NPP"). Mayor Aponte, currently serving his third term in office, is a member of the Popular Democratic Party ("PDP"). In 1995, the Municipal Assembly of the Municipality of Carolina approved a plan to privatize the Department. The privatization plan called for the layoff of all employees in the Department, including the thirteen plaintiffs in this case.

Following the decision to privatize, the Municipality sent each employee a notification letter informing them that the decision to layoff personnel would be made pursuant to the "Layoff Plan." ¹ The employees were later informed that the Municipality would attempt to relocate as many employees as possible by helping them obtain work with the private contractor taking over the Department or by placing them within other departments of the Municipality.

As part of this process, the plaintiffs were offered unskilled laborer positions with other departments in the Municipality of Carolina. These positions, however, constituted a demotion from their prior jobs. Seven of the thirteen plaintiffs met with municipal officials but declined their offers for employment. Six of the plaintiffs failed to meet with officials at all to discuss employment options. Municipal officers also called the plaintiffs to their offices so that plaintiffs could fill out job applications with the private company taking over the Department. Only three of the plaintiffs filled out the applications with the contractor.

The plaintiffs sued Mayor Aponte, in both his official and individual capacities, and the Municipality of Carolina pursuant to 42 U.S.C. § 1983. The plaintiffs alleged that the decision to privatize the Department, the Municipality's failure to relocate the plaintiffs within the Municipality, and its failure to later recall the plaintiffs when positions became available, were politically motivated in violation of their rights under the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution.

Defendants moved for a summary judgment on the plaintiffs' claims that the decision to privatize the Department and the failure to relocate the plaintiffs were acts of political discrimination. The district court granted summary judgment on the privatization claim on the ground that the plaintiffs failed to offer any evidence from which a factfinder could infer that political affiliation was a substantial or motivating factor in the elimination of the Department. ² On the relocation claim, ³ however, the district court denied summary judgment. ⁴

Following the entry of a partial summary judgment, the district court ordered the claims of failure to relocate and failure to recall plaintiffs to proceed and scheduled a pre-trial settlement conference. At the conference, the court found that the plaintiffs, on the eve of trial, had not yet offered the evidence necessary to proceed in a political discrimination case. As a result, the district court ordered each plaintiff to file answers, under oath, to four interrogatories issued by the court itself. Only one of the thirteen plaintiffs, Angulo-Alvarez, filed answers to the court-ordered interrogatories within the prescribed time. Defendants filed a motion to dismiss the plaintiffs' complaint for failure to comply with the court's order. The district court granted the motion with respect to the twelve plaintiffs who failed to respond in toto. It also granted a dismissal of Angulo-Alvarez's claim on the ground that his answers were inadequate.

The plaintiffs appeal the entry of summary judgment on their privatization claim and the subsequent dismissal of their remaining claims of failure to relocate and failure to recall.

II. Summary Judgment

We review the summary judgment entry de novo, taking the facts in a light most favorable to the nonmoving party. See Rivera-Cotto v. Rivera, 38 F.3d 611, 613 (1st Cir.1994). We will affirm the entry of judgment if "the pleadings, depositions, answers to interrogatories, and admissions on file, together with the affidavits, if any, show that there is no genuine issue as to any material fact and that the moving party is entitled to judgment as a matter of law." Fed.R.Civ.P. 56. Even where motive or intent is at issue, "summary judgment may be appropriate if the nonmoving party rests merely upon conclusory allegations, improbable inferences, and unsupported speculation." Rivera-Cotto, 38 F.3d at 613(quoting Medina-Munoz v. R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., 896 F.2d 5, 8 (1st Cir.1990)).

When political discrimination is alleged in a case involving the dismissal of a non-policymaking employee, the plaintiff must first produce sufficient evidence, either direct or circumstantial, from which a "rational jury could find that political affiliation was a substantial or motivating factor behind the adverse employment action." Rodriguez-Rios v. Cordero, 138 F.3d 22, 24 (1st Cir.1998). Once the plaintiff meets the threshold burden, the burden then shifts to the defendant-employer who must "articulate a nondiscriminatory basis for the adverse employment action and prove by a preponderance of the evidence that it would have been taken without regard to plaintiff's political affiliation." Id.; see also LaRou v. Ridlon, 98 F.3d 659, 661 (1st Cir.1996); Acevedo-Diaz v. Aponte, 1 F.3d 62, 66 (1st Cir.1993).

Here, the plaintiffs claimed that privatization of the Department was an act of political discrimination. The district court concluded that the plaintiffs had failed to present any evidence "from which [one] might infer that political affiliation was the substantial or motivating factor in the elimination of the [Department]." We agree. The plaintiffs' complaint stated that the plaintiffs were NPP followers and that Mayor Aponte had "developed a policy, custom or practice of political discrimination against members of the New Progressive Party." The only evidence submitted in support of those allegations was the affidavit of plaintiff Angulo-Alvarez. ⁵ In the affidavit, Angulo-Alvarez stated that Mayor Aponte is a member of the PDP and that the plaintiffs are known, active members of the NPP. He claimed that of the seventy employees in the Department, most of them were NPP supporters and that this "bothered" the management of the municipality of Carolina. Neither Angulo-Alvarez's affidavit nor any other evidence in the record supports the statements that (1) the majority of Department employees were NPP followers or (2) that, even if true, the Municipality was troubled by a strong NPP presence in the Department. Angulo-Alvarez's statements were speculative assertions with no basis in the record. ⁶

Indeed, although the plaintiffs alleged that a majority of the employees at the Department were NPP followers, defendants correctly note that the plaintiffs' own statements belie the accuracy of this statement. The plaintiffs claim--and defendants do not dispute--that there were a total of seventy employees in the Department. In the plaintiffs' motion for reconsideration of the dismissal of their complaint, they listed 29 PDP followers who were relocated to other jobs. Combined with the other six names set forth in additional documentation, at least half of the employees in the Department must have been PDP followers. At the very most, the plaintiffs can claim that the Department was evenly split between PDP and NPP followers. On this evidence, no rational jury could conclude that the decision to privatize the department was politically motivated. Given that the plaintiffs failed to meet their initial burden of presenting a prima facie case of discrimination, the court properly entered summary judgment on the privatization claim.

III. Motion to Dismiss

As the court explained in its final order dismissing the plaintiffs' complaint, the court concluded at the pretrial settlement conference that the plaintiffs could not "proffer ... elementary evidence crucial to a political discrimination case despite the fact that they carry that burden at trial." Concerned with the plaintiffs' ability to meet their burden at trial, the court ordered each plaintiff to answer four interrogatories. ⁷ In the minutes of the conference, the court explained:

[T]he only issue remaining in this action is the MUNICIPALITY's liability for having failed to relocate/recall plaintiffs. Accordingly, plaintiffs would have to establish at trial that they were laid off and not relocated/recalled even though: (1) there were employment positions available within the MUNICIPALITY (2) for which they qualified and (3) these positions were filled by PDP followers instead.

Plaintiffs were not able to identify a...