Brown v. City of Manchester
| Decision Date | 25 September 1986 |
| Docket Number | No. 85-243-II,85-243-II |
| Citation | 722 S.W.2d 394 |
| Parties | William R. BROWN, Plaintiff/Appellant, v. CITY OF MANCHESTER, Tennessee, Defendant/Appellee. |
| Court | Tennessee Court of Appeals |
Rick L. Moore, Russell D. Hedges, Robertson, Worsham, Moore & Hedges, Tullahoma, for plaintiff/appellant.
Alec Garland, Manchester, for defendant/appellee.
This appeal involves the efforts of the former Director of Parks and Recreation for the City of Manchester to be paid for the compensatory time he accumulated while employed by the City. The former director brought this action in the Chancery Court for Coffee County seeking to recover the value of this leave time after the City refused to keep him on its payroll until this leave was used up. The City filed a Tenn.R.Civ.P. 56 motion for summary judgment asserting that its own compensatory leave policy was invalid. The trial court granted the City's motion and dismissed the complaint. The former director has perfected this appeal. We vacate the summary judgment because the City has not conclusively demonstrated that it is entitled to a judgment as a matter of law.
The City of Manchester hired William R. Brown on April 1, 1980 as its Director of Parks and Recreation. He was the only full-time, salaried employee of the Recreation Department for the first eighteen months of his employment. The scope and nature of his work were controlled by the City's Recreation Commission, and Mr. Brown asserts that his duties required him to work longer hours than the City's normal forty hour work week. The City does not deny this.
On August 28, 1981, the Mayor of Manchester sent a letter to all of the City's department heads on the subject of overtime pay. This letter, which was intended to be "simply a clarification of existing law" stated:
Effective immediately, it is my policy that City employees that are on salary pay scale, as opposed to hourly wage scale, will not be paid "time and one-half" for any reason.
Additionally, salaried employees will not be paid "straight" time for extra work performed outside the normal duty hours without my specific approval. Salaried employees may be granted compensatory time off 1 for work performed outside of normal duty hours.
Those employees on hourly wage scale will be paid "time and one-half" for work performed over forty (40) hours per week or holiday work.
The City concedes that this letter was issued after it was required to compensate a salaried employee at the rate of one and one half times his regular rate of pay for additional work.
Brown asserts that this letter was circulated to all department heads, posted upon city bulletin boards, and followed by the City's various departments, particularly the fire and police departments. Brown also alleges that the members of the Board of Mayor and Aldermen were aware of this letter even though the policy contained in it was never formally promulgated by the Board as a city ordinance.
Brown also alleges that he and other city employees started to earn and use compensatory time after the mayor's August 28, 1981 letter was issued. He asserts that he kept detailed records concerning the accrual of his own compensatory time. Thus, in 1981 after the issuance of the letter, Brown states that he accrued 188 hours of compensatory time and used 64 hours. Likewise, he states that in 1982, he accrued 925 hours of compensatory time and used 185 hours and that in 1983, until he ceased working, he accrued 381 hours and used 70 hours. Accordingly, Brown claims that he accumulated 1,175 hours of compensatory time from the time the mayor's letter was issued until the time he resigned. The City does not specifically dispute Brown's figures.
Brown submitted his letter of resignation to the City on August 10, 1983. In this letter, he requested credit for two weeks of earned but unused vacation time and thirty-two weeks of accrued compensatory time. Thus, he stated that the effective date of his resignation would be April 6, 1984.
Apparently, the City compensated Brown for his unused vacation time but refused to pay him for his accumulated compensatory time. Brown filed this action
for the purpose of recovering the monetary value of Plaintiff's compensatory time which was accumulated during the period of August 31, 1981, through August 2, 1983, in the aggregate amount of 1,175 hours.
The City, in its answer, did not deny Brown's allegations concerning the work he had performed for the City and admitted that the mayor had issued the August 28, 1981 letter. However, the City asserted as a defense to Brown's claim that
the mayor is powerless to issue an Executive Proclamation or to authorize compensatory time off for work performed outside of normal duty hours for salaried employees without such an authorization having been first passed by four members of the Manchester Board of Mayor and Aldermen, as required by the City Charter.
The City also filed a Tenn.R.Civ.P. 56 motion for summary judgment supported by the city recorder's affidavit to the effect that the minutes of the meetings of the City's Board of Mayor and Aldermen do not contain any reference to a "compensatory time off policy." The remainder of the affidavit contains the city recorder's opinions about the mayor's authority and about the merits of Brown's complaint. These opinions are incompetent and irrelevant.
The trial court granted the City a summary judgment. While the order does not specify the basis for the decision, the trial court appears to have based its decision upon the City's theory that the policy contained in the mayor's August 28, 1981 letter was unenforceable because it was not promulgated as a city ordinance.
This is an appeal from a summary judgment. Thus, our role is not to conduct a Tenn.R.App.P. 13(d) review but rather to determine whether the summary judgment meets the standards set forth in Tenn.R.Civ.P. 56. Hill v. City of Chattanooga, 533 S.W.2d 311, 312 (Tenn.Ct.App.1975). Tenn.R.Civ.P. 56.03 requires a party seeking a summary judgment to demonstrate that there are no material factual disputes and that it is entitled to a judgment as a matter of law. Celotex Corp. v. Catrett, --- U.S. ----, 106 S.Ct. 2548, 2553, 91 L.Ed.2d 265 (1986) an...
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