Opinion ID: 625138
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: the rulings

Text: About a year after he filed suit, Soto-Padró became a PBA Regional Director a position he still holds, the parties tell us, and likes very much, not only because he got a nice salary bump but also because none of the individual defendants have any supervisory authority over him. In any event, the district judge later granted the defendants summary judgment. Stripped to essentials, his reasoning ran this way: The PBA's enabling legislation describes the PBA's mission as fulfilling an essential government function, see P.R. Laws Ann. tit. 22, § 902, but the judge concluded that the PBA is not an arm of the state, so it is not protected by the Eleventh Amendment. [5] Moving on, the judge held that the summary-judgment record compels the conclusion that the defendants would have taken the same employment action against Soto-Padró even if he were a PDPer, which defeated his political-discrimination claim. Also, the only differences between Field Operations Supervisor and Technical Services Supervisor, the judge stressed after surveying the summary-judgment material, were, first, the duties performed, and, second, the salary scale. And neither change, he quickly added, worked a loss of a constitutional property interest. Consequently, Soto-Padró's due-process theories failed too. The judge also jettisoned all prayers for declaratory and injunctive relief as moot or unripe (why he did that does not really matter in this appeal, for reasons that we get to later), and he dismissed the local-law claims without prejudice. Soto-Padró later filed a motion under Fed.R.Civ.P. 59(e), asking the judge to reconsider, but the judge denied the motion.