Opinion ID: 200604
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Stipulated and Undisputed Facts

Text: Defendant Vera, representing the Popular Democratic Party (PDP), won the November 1996 mayoral election in Adjuntas, and appointed Defendant Gonzalez, a fellow PDP member, to be the Director of Human Resources on January 14, 1997. Vera and Gonzalez inherited a municipal government whose ranks were swelled by 115 new hires during the seven-year administration of Rigoberto Ramos, Vera's predecessor, and a member of the rival New Progressive Party (NPP). Of those 115 employees, only 2 were affiliated with the PDP. By January 1997, the municipality employed 229 regular employees, and the parties stipulated prior to trial that many departments were so overstaffed that some employees did not have desks. On April 30, 1996, the Puerto Rico Comptroller's Office published an audit report, M-96-14, indicating that Adjuntas had accrued annual budget deficits of at least $1,000,000 from 1985 to 1990. After Vera took office in January 1997, he commissioned a second financial audit of the municipality by Reinaldo Ramirez, a certified public accountant. Ramirez presented his report on May 3 The facts presented here are intended to convey a general impression of the case. We provide additional facts in subsequent sections of the discussion where they are pertinent to the legal analysis. -6- 8, 1997, informing city officials that the municipality had a budget deficit of over $5,000,000 and long term debts totaling more than $2,000,000. Anticipating this unwelcome news, Vera had previously hired a Human Resources Consulting firm in February 1997 to prepare a Layoff Plan for Municipality of Adjuntas Employees (the Plan). The consultants completed the Plan in March 1997, and it received approval from the Adjuntas Municipal Assembly on April 2, 1997 (as required under Puerto Rico's Autonomous Municipalities Act). See 21 P.R. Laws Ann. § 4551, as amended (1995) (Law 81). On April 11, 1997, a copy of the Plan was circulated to every municipal employee. In broad strokes, the Plan (1) enumerated the steps the municipality was obliged to undertake before firing employees (including relocation, retraining, temporary unpaid leave, demotions to vacant positions, and voluntary retirement); (2) established an order of priority for laying off municipal workers; and (3) established a series of procedures for earmarking particular employees and job classifications for termination, and for providing notice to the affected individuals. The Plan was not self-executing. Instead, it authorized the termination of municipal employees [w]hen the Mayor determines that there are financial problems and that as a result, programs or services are being affected. The Mayor made this determination in May 1997 after conferring with Ramirez and the Human Resource consultants, -7- and he ordered city officials to implement the Plan. When the dust settled on October 31, 1997, 102 employees, including 82 NPP members and 11 PDP members, had been fired from their career positions. Since January 1, 1997, the municipality has hired seventy-seven new employees to contract or fixed-term jobs funded through non-municipal sources (i.e. federal and state programs). The most significant of these programs, referred to as Law 52, allows municipalities to present job training proposals to the Labor Department of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, which may then appropriate funds on an annual basis to underwrite the salaries of a certain number of municipal employees that the city could not otherwise afford. Only five of the eighty-two plaintiffs received one of these seventy-seven appointments, the vast majority of which went to PDP members.