Habben v. City of Fort Dodge
| Decision Date | 29 January 2007 |
| Docket Number | No. C 05-3076-MWB.,C 05-3076-MWB. |
| Citation | 472 F.Supp.2d 1142 |
| Parties | Stephanie HABBEN, Plaintiff, v. CITY OF FORT DODGE; Fort Dodge Housing Agency; Carolyn Olson, Individually and in her official position as Executive Director of the Fort Dodge Housing Agency; and Rochelle Nolte, Individually and in her official capacity as Section 8 Housing Manager of the Fort Dodge Housing Agency, Defendants. |
| Court | U.S. District Court — Northern District of Iowa |
Marcy Jo Rial Lundberg, Blake Parker, Blake Parker Law Office, Ft. Dodge, IA, Iris E. Muchmore, Simmons Perrine Albright Ellwood, Cedar Rapids, IA, for Plaintiff.
Stuart J. Cochrane, Johnson, Erb, Bice, Kramer, Good & Mulholland, PC, Fort Dodge, IA, Jason M Steffens, Simmons, Perrine, Albright & Ellwood, PLC, Cedar Rapids, IA, for Defendants.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
I. INTRODUCTION ..........................................................1146
A. Factual Background ................................................1146
1. Facts deemed admitted by operation of local rules .............146
2. Essential facts ...............................................1149
B. Procedural Background .............................................1151
II. LEGAL ANALYSIS ........................................................1152
A. Summary Judgment Standards ........................................1152
B. The Housing Agency Defendants' Motion For Summary Judgment ........1154
1. Individual liability ..........................................1154
a. Arguments of the parties ..................................1154
b. Analysis ..................................................1155
2. Sufficiency of Habben's claims ................................1156
a. Race discrimination .......................................1157
i. Arguments of the parties ............................1157
ii. Habben's "direct" evidence ..........................1159
iii. Habben's "circumstantial" evidence ..................1160
b. Sex discrimination ........................................1165
i. Arguments of the parties ............................1165
ii. Analysis ............................................1166
C. The City's Motion For Summary Judgment ............................1168
III. CONCLUSION ............................................................1169
The plaintiff in this case asserts that she was terminated from her job with a municipal housing agency in violation of state and federal prohibitions on race and sex discrimination after she gave birth to her third biracial child. In a motion for summary judgment, the defendant city asserts that it is not a proper defendant on any of the plaintiffs claims, and in a separate motion for summary judgment, the housing agency defendants — the housing agency itself and certain of its officials — assert that all of the plaintiffs claims fail as a matter of law.
The court will not attempt here an exhaustive dissertation on the undisputed and disputed facts in this case. Rather, the court will set forth sufficient of the facts, both undisputed and disputed, to put in context the parties' arguments concerning the defendants' motions for summary judgment. The court will then discuss specific factual disputes in the context of pertinent portions of its legal analysis. Before providing even a summary of the factual context for the plaintiffs claims, however, the court must address some of the problems that the court has encountered with determining what facts are actually in dispute in this litigation.
The court's ability to determine precisely what facts the parties accept as undisputed and which they contend are genuinely disputed has been considerably hampered by the plaintiffs failure to file a response to either of the statements of facts submitted by the moving defendants as required by the local rule governing summary judgment motions. Local rule 56. 1(b) provides, in pertinent part, as follows:
b. Resisting Party's Documents. A party resisting a motion for summary judgment must, within 21 days after service of the motion, file contemporaneously all of the following:
* * *
2. A response to the [moving party's] statement of material facts in which the resisting party expressly admits, denies, or qualifies each of the moving party's numbered statements of fact, filed as an electronic attachment to the brief under the same docket entry;
3. A statement of additional material facts that the resisting party contends preclude summary judgment, filed as an electronic attachment to the brief under the same docket entry[.]
N.D. IA. L.R. 56.1(b)(2). The plaintiff failed to comply with this rule.
Specifically, instead of filing both the required response to each moving defendant's statement of material facts pursuant to N.D. IA. L.R. 56.1(b)(2) and a statement of additional facts pursuant to N.D. IA L.R. 56.1(b)(3), the plaintiff filed only a "Statement Of Contested Material Facts" in response to each motion for summary judgment. Moreover, even though the plaintiff's statements of "contested" facts track the defendants' statements of facts paragraph-by-paragraph, the plaintiff often fails to "expressly admit[ ], den[y], or qualif[y] each of the moving party's numbered statements of fact" in her corresponding paragraphs, as required by N.D. IA. L.R. 56.1(b)(2). Instead, some of the numbered paragraphs of the plaintiff's statements of "contested" facts, which are apparently meant to correspond to the numbered paragraphs of the defendants' statements of facts, assert additional facts with no clear indication of how they qualify, or even relate to, the facts stated by the moving parties.1 Other paragraphs of the plaintiff's response consist of or include objections to "implications" of or "inferences" from facts stated by the defendants, again without clearly admitting, denying, or qualifying the facts actually stated by the defendants.2 Thus, such paragraphs of the plaintiff's statements of "contested" facts are not properly responsive to the corresponding paragraphs of the defendants' statements of fact.
The local rule applicable to summary judgment motions also defines the consequences of failing to provide proper responses to a moving party's statement of facts, as follows:
A response to an individual statement of material fact that is not expressly admitted must be supported by references to those specific pages, paragraphs, or parts of the pleadings, depositions, answers to interrogatories, admissions, exhibits, and affidavits that support the resisting party's refusal to admit the statement, with citations to the appendix containing that part of the record. The failure to respond, with appropriate citations to the appendix, to an individual statement of material fact constitutes an admission of that fact.
N.D. IA. L.R. 56.1(b) (unnumbered paragraph) (emphasis added). Here, because the plaintiff failed to make a proper response to several of the defendants' statements of facts as required by N.D. IA. L.R. 56.1(b)(2), the court could treat as admitted any fact statements to which no proper response has been filed. The court has done just that quite recently in another case in which a responding party failed to comply with N.D. IA. L.R. 56.1(b)(2). See Saeemodarae v. Mercy Health Services — Iowa Corp., 456 F.Supp.2d 1021, 1025-26 (N.D.Iowa 2006). In that case, however, the court deemed admitted all facts set forth in a statement of facts to which no proper response had been filed only after the court had expressly advised the parties that compliance with N.D. IA. L.R. 56.1 was required for their submissions in support of or resistance to a motion for summary judgment filed after the court had "converted" a motion to dismiss pursuant to Rule 12(b)(6) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure into a motion for summary judgment. Id. The court does not believe that such an express reminder to comply with the applicable local rules should be required in all cases, because N.D. IA. L.R. 56.1 itself provides sufficient notice of the manner in which the parties are to file and respond to a motion for summary judgment as well as the consequences for failing to do so. Nevertheless, under the circumstances presented here, in order to give the plaintiff all reasonable inferences from the facts in the record, as the court must do on motions for summary judgment, see Matsushita Elec. Indus. Co. v. Zenith Radio Corp., 475 U.S. 574, 587, 106 S.Ct. 1348, 89 L.Ed.2d 538 (1986), the court will only deem admitted facts set forth in the defendants' statements of facts to which the court can find no plainly contrary statement in the plaintiff's statements of "contested" facts.3
Notwithstanding the confusion arising from failure to comply with the applicable local rule concerning the parties' statements of facts, it appears that the parties agree that plaintiff Stephanie Habben was hired on December 6, 2000, as a Section 8 Housing Assistant with the Fort Dodge Housing Agency (the Agency) by then-Executive Director Rayme Nuckles. Habben's direct supervisor throughout her employment with the Agency was defendant Rochelle Nolte, the Section 8 Housing Manager. At some point during Habben's employment, defendant Carolyn Olson became the Executive Director of the Agency and, thus, Nolte's supervisor.
The Agency was created by a resolution of the City of Fort Dodge (the City) on February 16, 1971, that authorized the Agency to exercise all of...
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