Court Opinion

ID: 9499300
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 17:43:56.661279+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:59:24.484128
License: Public Domain

WILLIAMS, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
The majority concludes that the plaintiffs failed to demonstrate the existence of a question of material fact because they did not produce evidence that a substantially equally valid alternative was available to the City in 1997, at the time of the contested promotions. But as the majority opinion discusses, the district court abused its discretion in excluding evidence of the City’s subsequent success with merit promotions at the sergeant level. See Chrisner v. Complete Auto Transit, Inc., 645 F.2d 1251, 1263 (6th Cir.1981) (“Certainly any subsequent practices adopted by the company would be relevant” to determination of whether plaintiff could show existence of “an alternative selection device with a disparate impact less than that of the challenged practice.”). With this evidence considered, the question of validity is answered. The only question is whether 30% merit promotions were “available” in February of 1997.
The majority opinion seems to conclude that the plaintiffs have not met their burden of demonstrating availability because the plaintiffs never presented the City with a proposal validated under the methods that were ultimately employed by the city. Nothing in the statute, the applicable regulations, or in our caselaw, however, indicates that, under 42 U.S.C. § 2000e-2(k)(l)(A)(ii), for an alternative to be available it must have been validated in this manner. At bottom, the relevant question is simply whether there is evidence in the record from which a reasonable jury could conclude that at the time of the contested *617promotions, the City could have used the 30% merit promotions proposal. The answer to this question is “yes.” Regardless of whether the process of formulating a promotional process for sergeants was more complex than that for either D-2 or lieutenant promotions, the fact that the City had successfully implemented essentially the same system for these ranks is powerful evidence that the alternative was available for sergeant promotions and the City refused to adopt it.
At the very least, a question of material fact remains as to whether the pace and nature of the City’s investigation into the possibility of using 30% merit promotions for sergeants was reasonable. This is underscored by the timeline of this case — as the majority opinion describes, the City’s Task Force recommended the use of the 30% merit promotions proposal more than one month before the promotions in question. In contrast, it took the City only eight days to move from the Task Force’s recommendation to implementation when the City examined its system for promoting lieutenants. There is a logical disconnect between the idea that the City’s own task force had recommended use of this system and the majority’s conclusion that this alternative was unavailable more than one month later. The explanation for this disconnect is that the majority has unnecessarily complicated the question of availability. An alternative is unavailable when, for verifiable reasons, the defendant cannot adopt it. A reasonable alternative is not unavailable simply because the defendant has not completed its own inquiry into the viability of the alternative.
A true situation of no viable alternative being available can be found in the Eleventh Circuit’s decision in Fitzpatrick v. City of Atlanta, 2 F.3d 1112 (11th Cir.1993). In Fitzpatrick, black firefighters challenged an Atlanta Fire Department rule that required them to be clean shaven because of the racially discriminatory impact of this rule. See id. at 1114 (“The twelve plaintiff-appellant firefighters in this case are all African-American men who suffer from pseudofolliculitis barbae (‘PFB’), a bacterial disorder which causes men’s faces to become infected if they shave them. It is generally recognized that PFB disproportionately afflicts African-American men.”). The firefighters proposed that “shadow beards” would constitute a less-discriminatory alternative with equal safety value, but the Eleventh Circuit concluded that the firefighter plaintiffs had failed to introduce sufficient evidence to raise an issue of material fact where the City had submitted voluminous evidence of the safety-necessity of its no-beard policy. See id. at 1122-23. This case is not like Fitzpatrick, where a less-discriminatory alternative literally did not exist for scientifically verifiable reasons. Similarly, the Second Circuit has observed that in housing disparate impact cases, the question of whether a proposed alternative is available should be determined by objective factors such as cost. See Hack v. President and Fellows of Yale College, 237 F.3d 81, 101 (2d Cir.2000) (“Factors such as the cost or other burdens of the proposed policy are relevant to a determination as to whether the defendant’s refusal to adopt an alternative housing procedure was reasonable.”), abrogated on other grounds by Swierkiewicz v. Sorema N.A., 534 U.S. 506, 122 S.Ct. 992, 152 L.Ed.2d 1 (2002).
An alternative was available here. There is a question of material fact as to whether the City took proper steps in assessing its viability and in promptly implementing it. While the City’s timing may have been perfectly reasonable in this case, this was a question for trial. By deferring to the defendant’s calculation of the time needed to implement an equally *618valid alternative, our decision invites abuse by defendants acting in bad faith. I therefore respectfully dissent from the majority’s affirmance of the grant of summary judgment.