Opinion ID: 201249
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Personnel Actions

Text: 53 Defendants rescinded the 1997 plan and reassigned several hundred employees, including Vazquez, in accordance with the 1991 plan. Sanchez testified that she advised Santiago to seek advice before deciding to rescind the 1997 plan. Santiago's uncontradicted testimony was that he did indeed seek such advice. As we have described, the nature of that advice was kept from the jury at trial. 54 Sanchez testified that the people whom she knew who were affected by the reclassification plan were NPP members. Rivera also testified that affected employees belonged to the NPP. However, the kind of personnel review undertaken by defendants necessarily would impact more NPP members because of the long dominance of the NPP over municipal affairs. Indeed, Santiago agreed with plaintiff's counsel that approximately seventy-five to eighty percent of the employees of Toa Baja are members of the NPP, and Rivera herself explained, because the employees who were given permanence in '97 [when the NPP had been in control of the city government for over twenty years], well, those were the employees who would be subjected to the application of the law in which their permanence would be taken away from them. 55 Santiago's uncontradicted testimony was that nearly half of the employees affected by the personnel changes actually received higher salaries. Plaintiff neither rebutted this testimony nor offered any evidence that there was a disparity — by political affiliation or otherwise — between those who received higher salaries and those who received lower salaries under the new reclassifications. 14