Vega v. Chi. Park Dist.
| Decision Date | 02 March 2016 |
| Docket Number | No. 13 C 451,13 C 451 |
| Citation | 165 F.Supp.3d 693 |
| Parties | Lydia E. Vega, Plaintiff, v. Chicago Park District, Defendant. |
| Court | U.S. District Court — Northern District of Illinois |
Matthew Christian Douglas, Catherine Simmons-Gill, Offices of Catherine Simmons-Gill, LLC, Chicago, IL, for Plaintiff.
Nelson A. Brown, Jr., Chicago, IL, for Defendant.
In this action, Plaintiff Lydia E. Vega (“Plaintiff”) alleges that her former employer, Defendant Chicago Park District (“Defendant” or the “Park”), unlawfully discriminated against her in violation of both 42 U.S.C. § 1981 and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 42 U.S.C. § 2000e, et seq. Plaintiff also brings two privacy-based pendant state claims against Defendant. This case is presently before me on Defendant's motion for summary judgment on all counts. For the following reasons, Defendant's motion is granted in part and denied in part.
Plaintiff began working for Defendant as a seasonal employee in 1990 and was promoted to Park Supervisor in 2004. As a Park Supervisor, Plaintiff's duties included overseeing park operations and programs, supervising employees and volunteers, training employees, conducting community outreach, and attending meetings and conferences. Plaintiff was assigned to Bessemer Park in Chicago, Illinois, which is located at 8930 South Muskegon Avenue. She was a member of Local 73 of the Service Employees International Union.
Defendant is a local government entity that provides cultural opportunities for the people of Chicago. It operates over 400 parks and other recreational facilities in Chicago, and in 2012, employed approximately 1,440 full-time employees, 1,277 part-time employees, and an additional 3,685 seasonal summer employees. The Park's employment policy is established by the Personnel Board, which produced a Code of Conduct for employees and accompanying disciplinary procedures and penalties. Defendant divides its employees into three geographical Regions; Bessemer Park is located in the South Region.
Mary Saieva is the Human Resources Manager for the South Region. Saieva reports to the Director of Human Resources, Michael Simpkins, who is responsible for overseeing and applying employment-related policies. In the South Region, Park Supervisors and Playground Supervisors are responsible for overseeing parks. Park Supervisors and Playground Supervisors perform essentially the same duties, activities, and functions, except that Park Supervisors oversee larger parks while Playground Supervisors oversee smaller parks.
Plaintiff is a Hispanic female who openly identifies as a Lesbian. Prior to the events that led to her termination on September 10, 2012, Plaintiff generally received satisfactory feedback when reviews were conducted. Plaintiff had never been disciplined for any reason, and her immediate supervisor, Park Area Manager Anita Gilkey, described Plaintiff as “a good leader, dependable and competent.”
The Park operates a telephone hotline where citizens and employees are given the ability to make anonymous calls about suspected wrongdoing by Park employees. If a complaint is received through the hotline, the Park's General Counsel assesses the complaint and decides whether to assign an investigator to follow up. On September 23, 2011, a Park employee placed a call through the hotline and accused Plaintiff of “theft of time” by alleging that Plaintiff on “several occasions [had] not put in a full eight hour day.”
Upon receiving this complaint, the Park began an investigation on September 27, 2012, enlisting Chicago Police Department Officers Leroi Catlin and Michael Hester to investigate Plaintiff's alleged wrongdoing. Edward Skerrett, a Caucasian male Park employee, also participated in the investigation. In a typical timesheet falsification investigation, the investigators gather background information on the employee and commence surveillance of the employee's home by videotaping the time that the employee leaves her house in her vehicle and the time that the employee arrives at their job site and parks her vehicle. These videotapes are then compared with the employee's timesheet. According to the Park, investigators have discretion to conduct as much surveillance as needed.
According to Plaintiff, at least one of the investigators identified and spoke to the Park employee who called the hotline to complain about Plaintiff. After searching Illinois Department of Motor Vehicle records and learning that Plaintiff was the owner of a burgundy Chevy Trail Blazer, Catlin and Hester began intermittently monitoring Plaintiff's Trail Blazer by recording the SUV's activity on videotape. Over the next five-and-a-half months, Catlin and Hester, along with other investigators, conducted 48 video surveillances. They videotaped the Trail Blazer when it left the Plaintiff's residence and also when it arrived and parked at Bessemer Park. Each video recording was date and time stamped.
Because they were videotaping from the inside of their car, these videotapes also recorded conversations between the investigators. In one recording, Hester remarked on Plaintiff's short hairstyle, while in other recordings, Catlin referred to the Plaintiff using the gender-based derogatory term “bitch” and remarked the Plaintiff “looks like a dude” because of “that short hair shit.”
Unaware that she was being investigated and monitored, Plaintiff continued to manually enter her timesheets in the Park's timesheet system and keep a logbook containing her hours.
On February 15, 2012, Catlin and Hester went to Bessemer Park and retrieved Plaintiff's logbook. Around this time, both investigators spoke to Plaintiff and told her that she needed to set up a meeting with them. On February 28, 2012, Plaintiff called Brian Flores, an attorney at Park's Law Department, to complain about what she believed was prejudicial behavior by the investigators and stated that she felt she was experiencing discriminatory treatment.
Plaintiff and her union representative met with Catlin and Hester on March 12, 2012. Plaintiff alleges that Catlin and Hester were hostile and accusatory during the meeting and were not interested in Plaintiff's explanations of her whereabouts on the dates in question.
Catlin and Hester filed a final investigative report on March 20, 2012. The report contained Plaintiff's timesheets, logbook pages for some dates, and a chart listing the result of each day's surveillance. Specifically, the report alleged that Plaintiff arrived at Bessemer Park at a later time than she entered on her timesheets and that Plaintiff failed to properly log all of her absences from Bessemer Park. The report concluded that Plaintiff had falsified timesheets for 13 days. This report was submitted to the Park's General Counsel, who passed it to Saieva.
The Park sent notice to Plaintiff on July 13, 2012 to set up a Corrective Action Meeting (“CAM”) with the Park's Human Resources Department and Saieva regarding the allegations that she had falsified her timesheet. The CAM occurred on July 26, 2012. Plaintiff attended the meeting along with her union representative. During the meeting, Plaintiff produced 56 pages of documentation to explain her timesheet discrepancies and refute the report's findings that she was not working on Park business. At that time, Plaintiff claimed that every employee is forced to falsify his or her timesheet, as timesheets are due before the timesheet period is over. Furthermore, Plaintiff stated that most salaried employees use an imprecise eight-hour period, such as 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. or 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., and that she almost always worked eight-hour days and sometimes worked more than eight hours.
On September 10, 2012, the Park sent Plaintiff a CAM disposition notice terminating her employment at the Park for timesheet falsification. The Park justified Plaintiff's termination as misconduct falling within the category of “Class A” misconduct (the most serious type of misconduct under the Park's Disciplinary Procedures), specifically “making a false statement or statements in any document required to be made or signed by the employee in connection with Park District employment, including daily attendance records and payroll records.” The Park now claims, however, that Plaintiff's misconduct should fall into the “Class B” category of misconduct where the recommended penalty is suspension, but termination is allowed in the most serious cases.
Plaintiff appealed the termination to the Personnel Board, and after an administrative hearing where both the Park and Plaintiff presented evidence and witnesses, the hearing officer affirmed her termination. The Personnel Board adopted the hearing officer's recommendation and affirmed the termination. Plaintiff has not appealed this decision to the Circuit Court of Cook County.
This is not the first time the Park investigated a Park Supervisor for falsifying timesheets. For example, in an unrelated investigation targeting Park Supervisor Denise Raymond, a Caucasian woman who was accused of leaving the job early to pick up her children without signing out of her logbook, Skerrett told Raymond that she was under investigation and should sign her timesheets after only three days of surveillance. The Park did not discipline Raymond and justified its decision by referring to its policy of giving all Park employees one 15-minute break and a 30-minute lunch each day. Additionally, in four other unrelated investigations of African-American male and female Park Supervisors and Playground Supervisors for timesheet falsification, the number of surveillances conducted ranged from 20 to 42 days. All four Park Supervisors and Playground Supervisors were terminated following a CAM or resigned during the disciplinary process.
In 2014, the Park had approximately 67...
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Vega v. Chi. Park Dist.
...This lawsuit followed.The case went to trial on four of the seven claims that survived summary judgment, Vega v. Chi. Park Dist. , 165 F.Supp.3d 693, 705 (N.D. Ill. 2016), including national-origin discrimination and retaliation under 42 U.S.C. § 1981 and Title VII, 42 U.S.C. § 2000e. The j......
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Vega v. Chi. Park Dist.
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Vega v. Chi. Park Dist.
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