Chappel v. Montgomery County Fire Protection Dist. No. 1

• Decision Date: 14 November 1997
• Docket Number: No. 96-5328,96-5328
• Citation: 131 F.3d 564
• Parties: Robert CHAPPEL, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. MONTGOMERY COUNTY FIRE PROTECTION DISTRICT NO. 1; Montgomery County Ambulance District, Defendants, Wayne Welch; Roger Minnich; Wendell Walters; George Updike; Philip Welch; John T. Lane; Shoen McCormick; Stanley Schwartz; Thomas C. Thornberry; Dr. Gregory Jones, in their individual capacities, Defendants-Appellants.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Sixth Circuit

Page 564

131 F.3d 564

Robert CHAPPEL, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. MONTGOMERY COUNTY FIRE PROTECTION DISTRICT NO. 1 Montgomery County Ambulance District, Defendants Wayne Welch; Roger Minnich; Wendell Walters; George Updike; Philip Welch; John T. Lane; Shoen McCormick Stanley Schwartz; Thomas C. Thornberry; Dr. Gregory Jones in their individual capacities, Defendants-Appellants.

No. 96-5328.

United States Court of Appeals, Sixth Circuit.

Argued April 22, 1997.

Decided Nov. 14, 1997.

Sun S. Choy (argued and briefed), James M. Burd and R. Allen Button (briefed), Williams & Wagoner, Louisville, KY, for Defendants-Appellants.

Debra Ann Doss (argued and briefed), Lexington, KY, Elizabeth J. Turley (briefed), Jackson & Watts, Versailles, KY, for Plaintiff-Appellee.

Before: MERRITT, RYAN, and HILL, ^* Circuit Judges.

RYAN, Circuit Judge.

Robert Chappel filed a complaint alleging, in part, pursuant to 42 U.S.C. § 1983, that the defendants violated the First Amendment by taking various retaliatory actions against him after he criticized the defendants for mismanagement, corruption, and unethical behavior. The defendants filed a joint motion for summary judgment on the merits or, in the alternative, on the basis of qualified immunity. The district court denied the defendants' motion, and the defendants filed the present interlocutory appeal seeking reversal of the district court's judgment on the issue of qualified immunity. We now affirm the denial of qualified immunity.

I.

A.

Regrettably, in order to explain adequately our reasoning with regard to the multiple issues raised in this appeal, we must burden the opinion with an extensive recitation of the relevant facts. We beg the reader's indulgence.

In 1983, Chappel was hired as a part-time emergency medical technician (EMT) by the Montgomery County Fire Protection District No. 1. At that time, the fire district provided basic life support (BLS) and ambulance services for the Montgomery County Ambulance District. By 1987, Chappel had assumed firefighting duties, and was employed by the fire district as a full-time EMT/firefighter. Like other EMT/firefighters, Chappel worked shifts at both the central fire station and a smaller station on East Main Street. Although the central station is equipped to provide both firefighting and EMT-ambulance services, the East Main station provides only firefighting services.

In 1990, acting on his own initiative, Chappel began a two-year paramedic training program at the University of Kentucky. He was certified as a paramedic in November 1992. At that time, neither the fire district nor the ambulance district provided the community with the advanced life support (ALS) services for which paramedics are trained. Over the course of the next few years, Chappel held several part-time positions as an "on-call" paramedic with employers other than the fire and ambulance districts.

Defendant Wayne Welch began working for the fire district in 1969. He became fire chief in 1971. Welch also served on the fire district's board of trustees from 1979 to November 1992. For the last seven years of this period, Welch was chairman of the fire board. In 1982, Welch was hired by the ambulance district's board of trustees to assume additional duties as the director of ambulance services.

B.

In October 1991, a Montgomery County newspaper, the Mt. Sterling Advocate, reported that the ambulance district would "upgrade" from EMT/BLS to paramedic/ALS service. In June 1992, the ambulance district received an $11,506 grant from the state to begin the paramedic program.

Chappel was, by his own admission, very interested in seeing the paramedic program implemented. In addition to recognizing that an upgrade to paramedic service would help save lives, Chappel explained that he would prefer not to have to work outside of the fire or ambulance districts in order to maintain his license as a paramedic.

In an affidavit submitted to the district court, Chappel explains that he began to believe, in early 1992, that there were serious problems with the finances and management of the fire and ambulance districts, which would jeopardize the implementation of the paramedic program. Specifically, though not exclusively, Chappel was concerned that the ambulance district was not collecting billings; district funds were being misappropriated; training and standard operating procedures (SOPs) for employees of the fire district were inadequate; Welch was practicing nepotism; and Welch's position as both fire chief and chairman of the fire board created a conflict of interest.

Chappel claims that, in the summer of 1992, he began to raise some of these concerns with "several board members," the state auditor's office, and Montgomery County Judge Executive Bill Johnson. In particular, Chappel complained that the ambulance district's finances were suffering because Carma Welch, Welch's daughter and the ambulance district's office manager, was not adequately pursuing the collection of debts. Chappel adds that he asked the state auditor's office to investigate the "possible misappropriation of funds by the Welch family," and that he spoke to Johnson about the possibility of "unearned benefits being paid to the Welch family, falsified time sheets of Carma Welch and other possible misappropriations."

On August 4, 1992, the fire and ambulance boards held a public meeting at Johnson's direction. Chappel attended the meeting and took the opportunity to discuss publicly the importance of a paramedic service and to air some of his complaints. He criticized the ambulance district for failing to maintain adequate collection procedures and for failing to take steps to implement the paramedic program. Again Chappel placed much of the blame on Carma Welch. Chappel also complained about a lack of SOPs and adequate training for fire-district employees, and he criticized Welch for serving as both fire chief and chairman of the fire board.

Finally, Chappel complained about Welch's apparent nepotism. In this regard, Chappel was particularly upset because he believed that various members of the Welch family who were employed by the districts "weren't really doing their job." He complained not only about Carma Welch, but also about Welch's wife, Mary Welch, whom Chappel believed was receiving unearned benefits. Mary Welch served as the director of disaster and emergency services until January 1994. She was also apparently paid to keep the minutes at fire-board meetings for some ten years, although she was not a member of the board. James McCarty, Jr., a former member of the ambulance board, noted that Mary Welch also received some "remuneration" from the ambulance district during each of the seven years he was on the board, although he could not recall why she was being paid.

When Chappel arrived at work on August 5, 1992, he discovered that he had been assigned to the East Main station. The parties do not dispute that after that date Chappel remained assigned exclusively to the East Main station for a considerable length of time, and that Chappel was therefore unable to participate in regular ambulance runs which originated, at that time, from the central station.

On October 15, 1992, Chappel attended a meeting of the fire board and, according to his affidavit, he complained that

the Fire Department was paying insurance for Mary Bruce Welch, Carma Welch and Tammy Welch even though they were not employees of the Fire Department, Wayne Welch was allowed to write checks ... on his signature alone and without proper safeguards as to how the money was being spent, [the Welch family had] exclusive use ... of a VCR owned by the Fire Department, and [Carma Welch] falsifi[ed] ... time sheets.

Chappel explained that he also complained about "the need to adopt[ ] standard operating procedures ... [and the] inadequacies in training."

Chappel states that on October 22, 1992, he attended a meeting of the Montgomery County Fiscal Court "to discuss these same concerns and [to] ... criticize[ ] the nepotism at the departments." Chappel states, and the parties do not dispute, that he continued to register similar complaints at fire and ambulance board meetings, and with individual members of the fire and ambulance boards, "up until the time of the filing of this action." An article in the Advocate, in June 1993, reported, for example, that Chappel had presented the ambulance board with "a petition signed by about 600 residents in favor of a paramedic program."

C.

After much turmoil, the ambulance district eventually committed itself to the implementation of the paramedic program. Chappel and eight others applied for positions as paramedics. The three-member hiring committee consisted of Welch; Stanley Schwartz, a member of the ambulance board; and Dr. Gregory Jones, the newly hired medical director of the ambulance district's paramedic service.

Dr. Jones testified that, originally, he had not been interested in serving as director because there was a lot of public criticism of the ambulance district's finances, and he had not believed there was "political support in the community for" an upgrade to ALS service. Dr. Jones decided to accept the position in 1994, however, because "the [ambulance] board had been completely remade and [had] rededicated itself to straightening out some of those problems."

Because paramedics work under the license of the medical director, the hiring committee was apparently led by Dr. Jones. After an interview in June 1994, Chappel was initially offered a part-time or on-call position. However, on August 10, 1994, Dr. Jones sent a letter to Welch, in which he wrote:

Since [Chappel] is a Montgomery County resident I had hoped that we could help [him] gain maturity and learn to be a team member by employing him on a part time basis. However his recent unreasonable and disruptive actions demonstrate that he is not only unreliable but is a threat to the harmonious team...