to work in the center to fifteen to twenty employees and also hang on you know their reduction and the number of employees working during that period when they were would like to start by pointing out that there is no controversy regarding the fact that all the events that took place in this one to require me to see had nothing to do with job performance this was a muted by female and it has been contested that all the plaintiffs were capable responsible bilingual employees with outstanding performance phrase that however were placed in a lower classification even  filing complaints i'm after that you started five in this complaint fema started to making inspections in the center and you hurt these employees had been working in this same center for thirteen years and contention that there weren't safety issues yes there were actually arguing that there were no safety issues which require detention well issues ok but you're saying those issues should have been ignored and they weren't because there was retaliation against people for having file complaints whether it was worth the investment of a lot of money to maintain a facility that the expenditure would go well beyond the repair of the existing facility and that as i recall their case they say look the need for spanish language responders to  from the public had gone down partly had had more on down because of internet availability partly had had gone down because of spanish speaking facility here was cost effective and thema was under pressure to be very cost effective you're right that's their argument what is your evidence that they were reviewing cases they were also making translation work so there is evidence in the in our position to the motion first for my judgment stating that the main competency of the center was not to take only spanish if this would have plenty of i'm sorry female would have followed the years then there was no need to close the center because they've done this before this is the nature of their of the agency understand we duck training work no because there's no know the sas or the have been declared then the employees are released based on performance  ten million dollars more expensive than the puerto rico center and doesn't have the doing well employees why wasn't that a consideration and now it was a consideration when also all the releases have to expire before and never  just for the united states please the court it seems like at this point the plea to sift conceded that there are in fact were serious safety concerns with the facility in san juan and so at that point as i think point is basically now agree the question is believe three years after the center closed so you know the fact that three years later and agencies spend some money on something different doesn't raise a tribal question about whether either of the center in puerto rico was safe or modern i think my friend now concedes that it was not  nor does it raise the question whether you know in fact fema really did have millions of dollars to throw around at the very end of my friends argument she suggested that simultaneous to closing the center in puerto rico there was some large expenditure being undertaken with respect a center in virginia just as an initial matter that's actually the first that i've heard of that i don't believe that they have argued that in their briefs i'm not familiar with that being on the record but i am informed by my colleague in fema that the transition that was going on in virginia had already been in the works for several years so you know obviously at that point much of the money had been spent on the project was just wrapping up and then the move was occurring but again as far as i know the plaintiffs have not argued that that is not in the record no alternative that the plaintiffs seem to be pressing alternative which they have to bring to establish is they're saying essentially that there should have been some kind of uniform layoffs from different centers to sort of solve this problem of excess capacity now there are a number of problems with that contention  the plaintiffs seem to say that there was some kind of a policy to have uniform reductions we've addressed that point in our brief in some detail if i can point you to page thirty nine footnote five in our brief there was no such policy with the plaintiffs are pointing to is just a theme a manu which says that that is a possibility that can be used it in gives a non exhaustive in kind of permissive set of criteria various criteria that human may choose to use in that circumstance and in that for do we actually go through every single record cite have pointed to in support of the proposition and none of them actually support that point the record cites are essentially just kind of statements by various plaintiffs that say you know at some point there was once a release that doesn't mean that there is any kind of a policy that would necessitate that but more importantly and i think your chance and you were getting at this before that doesn't solve the actual problem and we had a building that was both on state in violation of applicable fire code and otherwise just in poor condition is a building that would process claims in the event of a hurricane and didn't have a roof that could withstand a hurricane as the plaintiffs themselves are arguing this is a building that didn't have ordinary modern electrical infrastructure so fema then had to spend millions of dollars upfront to either move to a modern facility or different kind of facility it opened in california three years later it's i believe just a call center it's not a new jersey and it's a kind of facility that essentially this was before it became a nipsey it happened three years later i don't know what costs  attention of management can point you to page three o two of the appendix one forty two of the appendix in one forty seven of the appendix female obviously is a very large agency they have many different buildings that housed many different kinds of operations in different kinds of offices  the female management it appears was not aware of the fact that this building was in poor condition and once fema became aware of that i mean what is it you do because the plaintiffs are not suing and urging that you know ten years earlier if you measure have spent nine million dollars in you know  are challenging are with they say or at recent time in actions that happened in two thousand and eight so when fema management becomes aware of the fact that a building doesn't comply with fire codes that it doesn't have a roof that can withstand a hurricane that it doesn't have potable drinking water at that point then weren't going to force these people to come to the office but nonetheless we're continuing to pay them it's obviously an unfortunate situation that the building wasn't working mission but this is the classic kind of business news necessity decision that needs to be made by an employer you've got a building that's going to cost millions of dollars to upgrade or relocate and then you ask yourself well is it worth the candle was it worth spending this huge sum up front and it turns out no one disputes that the folks who work in the center were doing a fine job but it turns out that there were folks elsewhere in the country who were also doing a argument very difficult for them because the last of the adverse the last of the protected activity that they can point to is a class complaint that was filed in mid two thousand and seven and the adverse employment action the first one that they try to point  about fourteen months later in july two thousand and eight i mean ordinarily i think what this warden of the supreme court has said is that if you're solely relying on temporal proximity and needs to be extremely close fourteen months is a very long period of temporal proximity particularly when you consider that during those fourteen months first the class complaint was actually dismissed so it's particularly odd to infer retaliation based on a complaint that was was basically over second it's particularly unusual to retaliate against every single person who works in the center not just to sort of get at those people who are filing a complaint and third i think most importantly this is on like auditing people employment discrimination cases where an action may be taken by a line level supervisor against a particular individual ultimately these decisions were made going all the way up the chain the director of facilities was involved the director of occupational safety was involved the fema administrator was involved and even the d h l secretary himself was involved there's no evidence that any of those folks were any complaint that year class complaint was dismissed so obviously i don't know the fact of the matter and that's not the that's not what's at issue in this case obviously if the plaintiffs pursue future litigation based on that claim then you know obviously that may come out with respect to whether the fish he was in poor condition yes it was and it was once the management discovered that the physical facility was in poor condition that it then conducted a more thorough inspection and looked at the alternatives investigated the cost of relocating our operating facility and then decided that it was not worth that up front expenditure  actually need to push back on the factual premise a little bit the plaintiffs in their briefs say all of point to nothing in the record that the individual plaintiffs were instructed to make individual claims and even that fact they've pointed to nothing in the record to support it i'm not aware of there actually having been any individual claims brought after the class complaint and you know obviously we're at summary judgment there is not a motion to dismiss they can't just kind of allege that something might have happened there's nothing in the record to say that there were individual complaints that were filed and by the to the extent that they would be relying on individual complaints it then becomes all the more implausible that the retaliation for a few individual complaints would have been to close down entire center and all the more impossible that then fema would pay everyone for a while to do no work if what they were trying to howard defendants have argued that they were not aware that this situation off the center or aware of the safety concerns because of all the other premises that they have already know that wasn't the argument the argument have they were aware for they say they were made aware not what i'm just trying to say is that there are only fort meade sees in the system and those are the three genie out of puerto rico to maryland and t muti so it's a little bit contradictory that being those the four major centers do you cater to the purpose of the agency which is provide assistance to the victims that they are not i'm sorry you're saying i children should be asked to decide whether the roof of the facility would withstand it the next hurricane even though they have the engineering evidence that supports their concerns not what we're saying there are multiple factional controversies shows such as this one that should be presented to the jury because when they do one when they examine all the evidence and the witness