Opinion ID: 194852
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Austerity Defense

Text: Through numerous expert witnesses and statistical data,4 defendants attempted to establish that all the chal- 4For example, defendants presented the following uncontroverted evidence: 1) in 1985, there were approximately 2,900 City employees, including 906 transitory employees, 459 of whom had been appointed by the former administration in fiscal year 1984 alone; 2) the former mayor had made 250-300 appointments between July and October 1984; 3) in 1984, despite warnings about the City's worsening budgetary problems, the former mayor renewed all transitory employees' expiring appointments; 4) by 1985, the personnel payroll comprised 80% of the City's budget; 5) in 1985, defendant Aponte inherited a debt of $116 million, which has since been reduced to $30 million, and an accumulated deficit of $30 million, since reduced to $3 million; and 6) by 1991, there were 1,966 City employees, only eight of whom were transitory employees. 9 lenged dismissals were due to the fiscal crisis inherited by Mayor Aponte when he took office in 1985, which the defendants attributed to mismanagement or illegal patronage hiring practices on the part of the previous administration. The jury reasonably could have found that the dismissals made by the incoming administration resulted in a 32% net reduction of approximately 900 City employees (from 2,869 to 1,966), and that no new employees were hired to perform the duties of the dismissed plaintiffs. Thus, the jury reasonably could have concluded that a bona fide fiscal crisis would have compelled the vast majority of the challenged dismissals even if the targeted employees had not been affiliated with the NPP. Defendants' well-deployed austerity defense apparently thwarted the claims of 240 of the 255 plaintiffs whose cases went to the jury. But blunt instruments make crude scalpels, and the Mt. Healthy defense requires individualized scrutiny by the jury with a view to whether a particular plaintiff's position would have been eliminated under Aponte's austerity program but for the plaintiff's NPP affilia- tion. In other words, even though defendants' overarching austerity defense may have established that massive dismissals were imperative, it did not compel jury verdicts adverse to all plaintiffs. General statistical data regarding net work-force reductions may mask individual dismissals which were purely discriminatory. Here, some plaintiffs testified that their positions remained intact after their termination and specifically identified their replacements; the jury was free to credit this 10 testimony, despite testimony to the contrary. See Veranda Beach Club Ltd. Partnership v. Western Sur. Co., 936 F.2d 1364, 1385 (1st Cir. 1991) (Once the threshold of sufficiency has been crossed, the credibility of a claimant and its witnesses presents a question for the jury, not for the trial court and most of all, not for the court of appeals.). Credibility determinations and evidence weighing are not grist for the Rule 50(b) mill. Hendricks, 923 F.2d at 214. As defendants were required to carry the burden of persuasion, and the evidence supporting the Mt. Healthy austerity defense did not compel jury acceptance of the claims of all 255 plaintiffs, we turn to the evidence bearing on the individual claims of the eleven appellants.