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Parties Involved:
Cheyenne Johnson
Appellee
Shelby County Government
Appellee
Shelby County Tax Assessor
Appellee
Vervita Stiger
Appellant

Document Text:

NOT RECOMMENDED FOR PUBLICATION

File Name: 15a0251n.06

No. 14-5787

UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS

FOR THE SIXTH CIRCUIT

VERVITA STIGER,

Plaintiff-Appellant,

v.

CHEYENNE JOHNSON, Shelby County 

Assessor of Property; SHELBY COUNTY 

GOVERNMENT; SHELBY COUNTY TAX 

ASSESSOR,

Defendants-Appellees.

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ON APPEAL FROM THE UNITED 

STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE 

WESTERN DISTRICT OF TENNESSEE

OPINION

BEFORE: SILER, COOK, and STRANCH, Circuit Judges.

JANE B. STRANCH, Circuit Judge. Vervita Stiger worked for Shelby County and

believed that she was entitled to be paid at a higher job-classification level based on the work 

that she performed. She filed this lawsuit, alleging that the county violated her procedural due 

process rights in considering her reclassification request and that the denial of reclassification 

was retaliation for First Amendment protected activity. The district court granted summary 

judgment to the defendants, and Stiger appealed. For the following reasons, we AFFIRM the 

judgment of the district court.

I. BACKGROUND

Shelby County employees are generally governed by a civil service classification system, 

unless they fall under specified exceptions. Shelby Cnty., Tenn., Code § 14-28 (2011) (formerly 

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codified at § 12-28). For each position within the classified service, the county prepares a 

written description of job duties and qualifications and assigns the position to a particular job 

classification. Id. § 14-29. Each classification is then assigned a particular salary range. Id. 

§ 14-30. The County Code further requires the county to establish written personnel policies. 

Id. § 14-31. The events at issue in this lawsuit span two fiscal years, and in each fiscal year, the 

county issued a Compensation Policy. Each policy provides that “this Compensation Policy 

supersedes previous salary policies, personnel systems, plans or guidelines.” The Compensation 

Policies further state: “Approved job evaluations resulting in reclassification to a higher salary 

level are not authorized unless otherwise provided by the approved budget of the funding source, 

consistent with prevailing resolutions adopted by the Shelby County Board of Commissioners.” 

This policy is consistent with a hiring and reclassification freeze resolution that was passed in 

May 2008 and renewed for several years.

Stiger worked in the Shelby County Assessor’s Office from 1979 until she retired in 

2011. In 2008, Stiger publicly campaigned for the Republican candidate for Assessor, but the 

Democrat, Cheyenne Johnson, won. Johnson and Stiger had been coworkers in the Assessor’s 

Office, and had a friendly relationship before the election. At a joint campaign event before she 

was elected, Johnson seemed to direct a hostile statement to a group of Assessor’s Office 

employees who supported her opponent, including Stiger. After the election, Johnson was less 

friendly to Stiger than she had been before. When Stiger announced her retirement, Johnson 

attempted to dissuade her and to convince her to continue working for the Assessor’s Office as a 

temporary employee.

Over her time at the Assessor’s Office, Stiger held a number of job classifications, 

culminating in “Administrative Technician.” In September 2008, she began working for Chuck 

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Blow in the Residential Reappraisal Department. A few years later, she applied for an 

Administrative Aide position in the Assessor’s office that paid $10,000 more per year than her 

Administrative Technician salary. After she was not selected for the position, she compared the 

job description to her day-to-day job duties and concluded that they were similar.

Stiger then sought a job study of her position, seeking to have it reclassified as an 

Administrative Aide position. She began by sending a memorandum to Blow and to Lorie 

Ingram-Glenn, the manager of the HR department. Ingram-Glenn denied the request and 

directed Stiger to the elected official, Cheyenne Johnson. Johnson, in turn, referred the matter to 

Ingram-Glenn’s supervisor, who again denied the request. Stiger pursued the grievance to a 

Fourth Step Administrative Grievance hearing, and the hearing officer noted a lack of power to 

reclassify Stiger and directed the Assessor to review her job duties. Ingram-Glenn conducted the 

“desk review” of Stiger’s duties and found that they were within the job classification. Finally, 

Ingram-Glenn’s supervisor reviewed her findings and approved them, stating that “this matter is 

closed.”

Stiger brought this lawsuit, alleging that the denial of her reclassification did not follow 

the county’s own procedures. She claimed that the deviations violated her procedural due 

process rights under the Fourteenth Amendment and constituted retaliation by Johnson for 

Stiger’s campaign activities in the 2008 election. The district court granted the defendants’ 

motion for summary judgment, reasoning that Stiger did not identify a property right for which 

procedural due process was required and that Stiger could show neither an adverse employment 

action nor adequate causation to sustain a First Amendment retaliation claim. Stiger appealed.

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II. DISCUSSION

This court reviews de novo the district court’s grant of summary judgment. Yellowbook 

Inc. v. Brandeberry, 708 F.3d 837, 843 (6th Cir. 2013). Summary judgment is appropriate if the 

record, viewed in the light most favorable to the nonmoving party, “shows that there is no 

genuine dispute as to any material fact and the movant is entitled to judgment as a matter of 

law.” Fed. R. Civ. P. 56(a); Matsushita Elec. Indus. Co. v. Zenith Radio Corp., 475 U.S. 574, 

587 (1986). “The mere existence of a scintilla of evidence in support of the plaintiff’s position 

will be insufficient” for the court to deny defendant’s motion for summary judgment; “there must 

be evidence on which the jury could reasonably find for the plaintiff.” Anderson v. Liberty 

Lobby, Inc., 477 U.S. 242, 252 (1986).

Stiger’s first claim sounds under the Fourteenth Amendment, which provides that “[n]o 

State shall . . . deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” U.S. 

Const. amend. XIV, § 1. To state a procedural due process claim, a plaintiff must first identify a 

protected liberty or property interest of which she was deprived. Bd. of Regents of State Colls. v. 

Roth, 408 U.S. 564, 570–71 (1972). Only then will we “examine[] whether the procedures 

attendant upon that deprivation were constitutionally sufficient.” Pusey v. City of Youngstown, 

11 F.3d 652, 656 (6th Cir. 1993) (internal quotation marks omitted). Stiger contends that she had 

a property interest in the salary for the job classification that accurately reflected her duties. 

“Property interests, of course, are not created by the Constitution. Rather they are created and 

their dimensions are defined by existing rules or understandings that stem from an independent 

source such as state law—rules or understandings that secure certain benefits and that support 

claims of entitlement to those benefits.” Roth, 408 U.S. at 577. “[A] party cannot possess a 

property interest in the receipt of a benefit when the [county]’s decision to award or withhold the 

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benefit is wholly discretionary.” Med. Corp., Inc. v. City of Lima, 296 F.3d 404, 409 (6th Cir. 

2002).

Stiger does not provide evidence that Shelby County maintained rules or understandings 

that guaranteed an employee additional pay if she performed work above her job classification. 

Her primary evidence on this point concerns coworkers who successfully requested job 

reclassification studies in 2000 and 2005. Stiger alleges that her entitlement to reclassification 

began in September 2008, when she began working for Blow and performed additional duties for 

him. In the recent case of Elion v. Shelby Cnty. Gov’t, No. 08-2411-P, 2012 WL 7110531, at 

*8–12 (W.D. Tenn. Dec. 10, 2012), however, the district court reviewed the prior policies and 

determined that they created no such entitlement. From at least May 2008 through Stiger’s

retirement on June 30, 2011, moreover, county compensation policies made clear that “job 

evaluations resulting in reclassification to a higher salary level [we]re not authorized” without 

explicit authorization from the Board of Commissioners.1 This language goes beyond leaving 

reclassifications to the discretion of individual county decision makers and makes such 

reclassifications available only in exceptional circumstances. Thus, even if prior county policies

had established an entitlement to reclassification, the intervening ordinances and policies barred

reclassification and extinguished any entitlement. Because Stiger cannot show that she had a 

property interest in the reclassification, her procedural due process claim fails.

Stiger’s First Amendment claim likewise fails. “For a public employee to establish a 

claim of First Amendment retaliation, he must show that (1) he engaged in constitutionally 

 

1

Stiger asserted in her Statement of Issues of Disputed Material Fact that the reclassification freeze ended in mid2009 and cites to two pages of a county official’s deposition for support. Only one of those pages is actually in the 

record, due to an apparent scanning error, and that page does not support Stiger’s assertion because it ignores the 

compensation policies. We doubt that the missing page somehow contradicts the plain language of the 

compensation policies, but the court could not ground a denial of summary judgment on hypothetical evidence not 

in the record, and Stiger made no effort to correct the filing.

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protected speech or conduct; (2) the employer took an adverse action against him that would 

deter an ordinary person from engaging in that conduct; and (3) there is a causal connection 

between elements one and two.” Rorrer v. City of Stow, 743 F.3d 1025, 1047 (6th Cir. 2014). 

Stiger satisfies the first element: She engaged in protected election-related speech. Even if we 

assume she could prove that the reclassification denial constitutes an adverse action, she cannot 

show any connection between the two.

Stiger’s primary evidence of causation is that Johnson knew of her campaign activities, as 

evidenced by both women’s presence at the joint campaign event. “This circuit has held that the 

nonmoving party cannot rely on the mere fact that an adverse employment action followed 

speech that the employer would have liked to prevent.” Taylor v. Keith, 338 F.3d 639, 646 (6th 

Cir. 2003) (internal quotation marks omitted). In certain cases, temporal proximity can be 

sufficient evidence of the causal relationship. See, e.g., Mickey v. Zeidler Tool & Die Co., 

516 F.3d 516, 525–26 (6th Cir. 2008). But in this case, the campaign event occurred 

approximately two years before Stiger even requested a reclassification study—let alone when 

Johnson purportedly interfered with Stiger’s request. Stiger’s additional evidence of causation is 

merely that Johnson was less friendly than she had been, and that other Assessor’s Office 

employees’ reclassification requests were treated differently before the County enacted its 

reclassification freeze. No reasonable jury, considering this evidence, could find that Johnson 

somehow interfered with Stiger’s reclassification request in an attempt to retaliate for her 

protected speech activities.

For the foregoing reasons, we AFFIRM the judgment of the district court.

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