By Amanda Fry and Mark Gutglueck

The fallout from the meltdown that occurred late last year between Redlands’ now-suspended city manager and that city’s former human resources director has continued to settle, with a bevy of highly embarrassing secrets that city officials formerly assumed would remain buried having now bubbled to the surface. More unpalatable for city officials is the prospect of yet other damaging details relating to how the city was conducting business over the last several years soon looming into public view.
The long-simmering tension between Redlands City Manager Nabar Martinez and the woman he hired to serve as Redlands’ head of personnel and risk management in 2013, Amy Martin-Hagan, devolved into a backroom brawl that took place outside the ken of all but the most senior of Redlands city officials beginning in September 2017. The reach and power of the two principals in the fight were considerable. Martinez, who had been the city manager with Redlands since 2007, enjoyed the relative advantage of having the favor and backing of the entire city council, which had given him wide discretion, authority and autonomy in running the city of 72,000. He had more than a quarter of century of experience in running municipal governments at the top, second-in command or high-ranking levels in five other cities in California as well as in Dallas, Texas and in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida.  After a decade as city manager in Redlands, Martinez had an institutional memory of the city’s operations and a command over the city’s staff that rendered him, if not indispensable, at least immediately irreplaceable if the city wanted to continue to function smoothly and without serious hiccoughs in the short or medium terms. Perhaps as significantly, Martinez had wangled an employment contract that would make it both exceedingly difficult and extremely expensive for the city council to remove him as city manager. Unless he found himself arrested, criminally charged and convicted, the council would not have cause to fire him without conferring upon him 18-month’s salary, running to $525,000, the cash value of a-year-and-a-half worth of benefits he received, running to another $117,500, and the cash value of certain perquisites he had accumulated, such as vacation, illness and administrative leave time, running to roughly a quarter of a million dollars. Moreover, if he were to be fired without citation of cause, the city would potentially be open to a wrongful termination suit, which might result in further monetary loss to the city as well as a court order to reinstate Martinez with back pay. On top of that, Martinez had intimate knowledge about the comportment of his political masters in their roles as city officials, their votes in public and their discussions in private closed sessions outside the view of their constituents, the deals they had cut and compromises they had made in the backroom, favors they had done for their own backers and friends, and requests they had made, some of which had been granted and some of which were turned down. Martinez enjoyed a somewhat less comprehensive but still insightful knowledge of certain aspects of the council members’ personal and professional lives and those of their family members. In any showdown between Martinez and Martin-Hagan, the city council was not only far more likely but almost assuredly bound to side with the former over the latter.
Martin-Hagan did not have the same level of insulation as Martinez. As a department head, she did not have union protection. She was an at-will employee, meaning essentially that with either the flimsiest of cause or no cause Martinez could cashier her, and the city was under no obligation to provide her with a severance of any sort. She could simply be terminated and that would be that. Nonetheless, Martin-Hagan was not without resources and leverage of her own. She had worked very closely with Martinez on a number of everyday, week-in week-out, mundane, routine, important and crucial issues in the time she had been with the city. As the director of human resources and risk management, she had immediate and almost exclusive access to the personnel files on every current and past city employee, their so-called jackets which contained their performance evaluations and notations with regard to failings, transgressions or discipline that had been meted out to them. Martin-Hagan had a front row seat with regard to how, at least during her tenure, Martinez had managed the performance of the employees working for him, what he had taken issue with, the standards he had set, what he had tolerated, what he had ignored and what he had let some employees get away with. She knew when, and most likely why, Martinez had used his authority as city manager to override her judgment and have her hire an applicant that she would not have extended employment to on her own using the criteria normally applied. In short, she knew where at least some of the bodies were buried.
And beyond the information and position power inherent in her vaunted station at City Hall, Martin-Hagan possessed a specialized knowledge about Martinez in particular, information that rendered him, at least to a point, vulnerable, and which offset some of the advantage he held over her.
Martinez had hired Martin-Hagan in 2013 in an effort to attenuate a deteriorating situation the city had found itself in with its previous human resources director, Deborah Scott-Leistra, and litigation filed against the city by former employees who alleged they had been discriminated and retaliated against or harassed by higher-ups in the city and/or constructively, unjustifiably or wrongfully terminated.  Martin-Hagan set about dealing with those cases, remedying matters by accommodating or attempting to accommodate some of those pursuing claims or suing the city through having them conditionally reinstated and returned to work with the city, deriving a successful defense of the city’s action in cases where reinstatement was not possible nor advisable, effectuating settlements short of terminations, and implementing policies to prevent the filing of further such suits against the city. She strove to be more selective in the city’s hiring to ensure that the city’s newly acquired workers were a better fit for the circumstances and roles they assumed with the city.
Relatively early on in Martin-Hagan’s tenure with the city, Martinez had pressed her to assist him in his own personal recruitment efforts, that is, the preparation and tailoring of his profiles to be submitted to dating sites. Though these unofficial assignments fell beyond the duties of her position and the parameters of her job, Martin-Hagan accommodated Martinez. The extracurricular demands that Martinez placed on Martin-Hagan were continuous and took up a considerable amount of her time at home, often until late in the evening or during weekends as she spent literally hours with him on the phone or in person weekly, during which Martinez insisted upon discussing intimate personal and sexual matters. Martinez had a predilection for petite women in their thirties and forties, and he continuously importuned Martin-Hagan to help him fine-tune his approach, including on-line, by phone and in person to meet his objectives. Martinez, who is now 71, was less successful in this quest than he would have wished, and he was continuously redoubling his efforts, insisting that Martin-Hagan render him assistance.
Martin-Hagan had resented Martinez’s presumptuousness in consigning her to assist him in that manner and had considered what Martinez was doing to be sexual harassment but had gone along with it because of her position as an at-will employee and Martinez’s power over her. By 2017, Martin-Hagan had reached the end of her tolerance with the situation. In reaching that point, she had also made other observations with regard to the propriety of Martinez’s action in the role of city manager, including what she considered to be examples of dishonesty, questionable or venal decisions and unethical conduct, out-and-out misrepresentations to the public or other city officials, including members of the city council, and incidents where she maintains Martinez had violated the law.  In September 2017, she resolved to no longer accommodate him and refused to assist him any further in the preparation of his on-line dating profiles or indulge him in his sexually-laced conversations. “I’d had it at that point,” Martin-Hagan said. “It was too much. I wasn’t willing to manage his dating profiles any more. I wanted to concentrate on my job. I told him that.” There ensued from Martinez, according to Martin-Hagan, a series of eruptions of extremely offensive insults and vulgarisms, as when he called her “a stupid, fucking minion.”
At that point, the clash of wills was joined. The city was at that point locked in negotiations with the union for its police officers. Martin-Hagan now contends that Martinez militated to “set me up to fail” by withdrawing a crucial form of support she needed to be able to adequately represent the city and city management in those collective bargaining sessions, consisting of an attorney to accompany her during the negotiating sessions. This put her, Martin-Hagan maintains, into a disadvantageous position where she was the only representative on the city’s side of the table facing off against more than a dozen aggressive representatives of the city’s police officers. Martinez, who had the authority to fire her, was unwilling to take that action on his own, sensing or fearing that Martin-Hagan might sally forth with information, evidence or accounts that would prove damaging to him. He nevertheless sought to pressure her, suggesting that concessions she was on the verge of making in contract negotiations would be met with the absolute displeasure of the city council. By virtue of the municipal chain of command, the council had the authority to directly terminate the city manager and the city attorney. In firing any other city employee, the city council could only make recommendations to the city manager, who ultimately possessed the authority to hand a city employee a pink slip. Despite that, Martin-Hagan said Martinez continuously threatened her by stating that the council was on the brink of terminating her.
Martin-Hagan last fall cataloged a host of actions by Martinez crossing what she considered to be procedural, ethical and legal boundaries and approached members of the city council, revealing what she knew, including recounting the abuse she had endured.
Martinez, whose first name is Nabar and middle name is Enrique, over the last decade-and-a-half has professionally used the name N. Enrique Martinez and is known generally in recent years to those who did not know him previously as Enrique.
Martin-Hagan said, “I told Dan [McHugh, Redlands’ city attorney] what was happening, and told him I was going to the mayor. I went to Mayor [Paul] Foster and told him, ‘Enrique is abusing me. You know he is abusing me.’ The mayor said, ‘There is nothing we can do unless we are willing to pay him the money, and we can’t do that now.’” The money Foster was referring to was the more than $890,000 the city would need to provide Martinez with as what was essentially a buy-out of his contract if they did not terminate him with cause. Martinez’s contract defined virtually anything less than a criminal offense as insufficient cause for his termination, Martin-Hagan said, rendering him untouchable. “I tried to whistle-blow, but they wouldn’t listen to me,” Martin-Hagan told the Sentinel.
October and November 2017 proved increasingly rough on her, Martin-Hagan said. By mid-October, she was signaling to city officials that she wanted to leave the city’s employ. Contrary to the threats that Martinez had leveled at her suggesting the city council was on the verge of firing her, she said there was an effort by the city’s top ranking officials other than Martinez to convince her to remain in her position. McHugh, she said, led that effort. In December, her relationship with Martinez had deteriorated to the point, according to Martin-Hagan, that it was adversely impacting her physical health. On December 12, her doctor provided her with an off-work authorization due to stress, essentially ordering her not to return to her office at City Hall, and from that point forward Martin-Hagan was no longer working for the city, though she remained on the city payroll. It was then that negotiations in earnest began between her and McHugh over her official separation from the city. Because of her at-will status, the city was not contractually obliged nor legally required in any fashion to provide her with a severance package upon her departure. Moreover, Martin-Hagan’s line of professional expertise and her duty – handling personnel matters along with limiting liability growing out of employee relations including discipline and firings to prevent the payouts of huge cash settlements to former employees who might sue the city over wrongful termination – rendered the option of filing suit against the city out of the question. “I am an HR [human resources] director,” Martin-Hagan said. “If I file a lawsuit like that, I’m done. My career would be over.” Still the same, Martinez’s actions and treatment of Martin-Hagan left the city vulnerable should Martin-Hagan have elected to seek redress through the civil process, and it was deemed prudent to arrive at some order of a settlement with her. Accordingly, over the course of more than three weeks of back and forth between Martin-Hagan and McHugh, a document titled “Settlement Agreement And Mutual General Release” was derived. Based in some measure on the terms contained in the departure settlement agreements extended to other department heads with the city such as former Police Chief Mark Garcia and former Fire Chief Jeff Frazier, the key provisions specified for Martin-Hagan were that she would be provided with a cash settlement of $133,981.25, derived from providing her with six months’ severance pay in the amount of $84,500 along with a $49,481.25 cash conversion of her accumulated 609 hours of vacation, illness and administrative break leave. According to language in the settlement agreement, the $133,981.25 was being tendered to her “in full satisfaction of all claims, known or unknown, asserted or non-asserted, and alleged wages due and owing to” her. The settlement language further stated, “It is understood that the payment is made to fully compromise and release employee’s claim against employer, including any employee’s attorneys’ fees and costs. Employer makes no representation as to the nature of this settlement.”
The settlement agreement called for the city putting $4,505 into Martin-Hagan’s employee retirement account as well, and it contained a provision which, while matching in precise aspect the same concessions given other city department heads who had been moved out of their posts, laid the foundation for the current contention between the city and Martin-Hagan and the resultant series of embarrassing revelations about backroom dealing at City Hall and the manner in which city officials have conducted themselves. That provision stated, “Employee shall be entitled to a ‘medical bridge’ program for herself upon separation from the city until she becomes Medicare-eligible. ‘Medical bridge’ is defined as employee-only coverage at the least expensive equivalent health, vision, and dental insurance plan as provided by employer to its then existing directors through the California Public Employee Retirement System medical plan until employee reaches the age of Medicare eligibility, at which time the benefit will cease. Employee may also select coverage for employee’s eligible dependents; however, the additional cost shall be paid for by employee and will not be paid for by employer.”
On January 5, 2018, both Martinez and Martin-Hagan signed the agreement. On the same day, Martin Hagan submitted a voluntary resignation letter, attributing her departure to “family health issues.” Martin-Hagan departed Redlands shortly thereafter, having landed the position of human services administrator across the California border with the Southern Nevada Health District.
Up until that point, the entire matter had remained under the public radar. It would likely have remained that way, according to Martin-Hagan, but for what turned out to be a drawn-out dispute over what she said amounted to $82 per month. Martin-Hagan’s health plan coverage with her new job did not include dental care, she says, so she attempted to trigger that portion of the medical bridge contained in her separation agreement with the city. The dental insurance she chose cost $95 per month. The city, citing the phrase “the least expensive equivalent” contained in the agreement, provided her with $13 toward the monthly payment, which the city said was its cost for basic dental coverage per employee based upon purchasing dental insurance in bulk. Martin-Hagan, contending that she was owed full payment of her dental coverage needs under the agreement, contested what the city was offering.
While employed with Redlands, Martin-Hagan had gone by the name Amy Martin. Subsequent to leaving Redlands, she began using the last name Hagan.
According to Howard Golds, an attorney representing the city, “In late January 2018, after the agreement was signed, a dispute arose regarding the medical bridge provision in her agreement. Hagan claimed that she did not have access to the requisite health coverage through the California Public Employees Retirement System.  The city offered to pay her a certain amount of money per month for Hagan to obtain her own health coverage, but Hagan claimed the amount offered was insufficient to purchase a plan with benefits equivalent to that which she had prior to her resignation. Hagan and the city exchanged several emails debating the scope of the medical bridge provision. That dispute continued and escalated to the point that Hagan retained an attorney who exchanged letters with the city attorney in May 2018.”
On June 25, Martin-Hagan sent the city a demand letter which threatened the filing of a lawsuit for breach of contract.  In reaction to the demand letter, the city council scheduled a closed door discussion of the matter, describing it as pertaining to potential litigation. As Martin-Hagan’s demand had been made under the name of Amy Hagan, outside of a narrow group of individuals at City Hall it was not recognized at that time that this involved the city’s former human resources director.
According to Golds, at that point Martin-Hagan’s demand had gone well beyond seeking the $82 more per month than the $13 the city was willing to provide her for the dental coverage she maintained was costing her $95 per month. Golds said Martin-Hagan wanted “$1,955 within ten days” and the city to “agree to her interpretation of the medical bridge, and pay her more on a monthly basis than the agreement required.” Also, according to Golds, “In this same demand letter, Martin-Hagan for the very first time alleged that she “was treated differently as a woman and asked to complete personal tasks for the city manager that [were] demeaning, inappropriate and against the law.”
Soon thereafter, it became known publicly that Amy Hagan was Amy Martin, the city’s former human resources director, which immediately invited a heightened level of scrutiny. Emanating from the city was the suggestion that Martin-Hagan was purposefully misinterpreting both the rationale for and the meaning of the term “medical bridge.” Rather than utilizing the medical bridge the city had given her in the spirit it was provided so that she would have medical coverage to “bridge” the time between her departure from the city until the time she became employed by another entity which would then provide her with medical coverage and at which point the city’s provision of that coverage would end, the city implied that the 41-year-old Martin-Hagan was asserting that the settlement agreement language should be interpreted to mean that the city had to provide her with full medical coverage until she reaches retirement age, i.e., 65. This would cost Redlands taxpayers, the city maintained, approaching half of a million dollars.
“When Hagan did not get her way, she attempted to file suit in Nevada on July 9, 2018, but was apparently informed that she must file suit in California,” according to Golds. “Accordingly, Hagan sent an email to McHugh on July 9, 2018, seeking a pay-out from the city of $125,000. In that email, she alleged for the first time that she resigned due to gender discrimination. She also sent text messages to the mayor of Redlands and a councilmember on the same day, wherein she for the first time alleged the specific details of the purported gender discrimination and sexual harassment. She disclosed in the first paragraph of each message that she raised the allegations for the mayor and councilmember to consider as ‘background’ to her $125,000 demand for her claimed medical bridge benefits. By doing so, Hagan effectively admitted that she is using these allegations as a bargaining chip to get a substantial payout from the city. She also used these allegations to pressure the mayor and councilmember, having never disclosed the details to McHugh. Only after the mayor and councilmember forwarded the messages did McHugh learn of such allegations.”
Martin-Hagan told the Sentinel that the city had forced her into taking legal action and that it was imputing to her a malicious intent she does not possess. “This is not my choice,” she said. “They are forcing me into this. I wanted to go away quietly.”
The language in the settlement agreement relating to the medical bridge was precisely the same as that offered to and accepted by other city department heads who had been pushed into voluntarily resigning from the city, she emphasized. She had, she maintained, medical coverage from her current employer that obviated her need to obtain health and vision insurance, and she was simply tapping the dental coverage aspect of the medical bridge commitment the city had made to her when the city crossed her up by providing her with a mere $13 to cover what was a monthly $95 expense. “Under applicable law, I had six months to contest that in a claim,” she said. “If I did not file a claim, then I would be bound to permanently accept the city’s interpretation – erroneous interpretation – of the settlement agreement. I would have waived my right to get what I was entitled to on the basis of having accepted what they were offering as the totality of what I was due. I could not do that, because if I am ever unemployed and do not have insurance through an employer, I am going to need that insurance.”
Furthermore, Martin-Hagan said, Gold was misrepresenting the level of knowledge top ranking city officials had about Martinez’s mistreatment of her. “They already knew,” she said. “That I was given the settlement shows that. They were under no obligation to provide that to me if I was just leaving the city on my own accord. At that point [December 2017/January 2018] we had mutually decided on my severance when they knew I was looking for another job and I told them it was due to stress and what I had been put through, including Enrique’s retaliation.”
Gold asserted that in December 2017, while McHugh was at first attempting to convince Martin-Hagan to stay with the city and then working with her to put together the terms of the settlement agreement, “at no time did Hagan inform McHugh of the incidents of alleged sexual harassment, gender discrimination, or retaliation that she now alleges in her charge.” Martin-Hagan disputed that, telling the Sentinel, “Dan already knew all about it. I may not have discussed it explicitly with him in December, but that was because I had already given him the full details of what was occurring months before. That was why we were working out a settlement agreement.”
So far, Martin-Hagan has yet to file suit, either for breach of contract or on her claim of sexual harassment, discrimination, retaliation or constructive termination. She did, however, file a charge of discrimination against the City of Redlands with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in Las Vegas. Throughout the summer, the city and Martinez appeared to be on a track to tough it out.  It was deemed advisable, given the degree to which McHugh had been a participant in the issues relating to Martin-Hagan’s allegations, to bring in a different attorney to represent the city through the process before the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The city turned to the law firm of Best Best & Krieger, which represents 242 cities and counties on legal matters, and in particular Golds, a partner in the firm whose areas of expertise include labor & employment, labor & employment litigation and public agency labor & employment. In the course of preparing for defending the city, Best Best & Krieger and Golds carried out an investigation of the relevant issues Golds anticipates he will encounter. That investigation turned up a number of harrowing pieces of evidence, which in addition to evidence known to be in Martin-Hagan’s possession, resulted in a report provided to the Redlands City Council in advance of and during a closed session on October 5. After three hours of discussion outside the earshot and visual range of the public, the council returned from that closed session and McHugh announced that Martinez had been placed on paid administrative leave.
Five days later, Martinez, having consulted with the Woodland Hills-based law firm of Goldberg & Gage, had filed on his behalf a Department of Fair Employment and Housing complaint against the city. In that complaint, dated, October 10 and worded by Terry Goldberg and verified by Martinez, it is alleged that the City of Redlands took “adverse actions” against Martinez, which included his being “harassed because of complainant’s ancestry, national origin [and] age” and that he “was discriminated against because of complainant’s ancestry, national origin [and] age, and as a result of the discrimination was asked impermissible non-job-related questions, denied employment benefit or privilege [and] denied work opportunities or assignments.”
Furthermore, according to the complaint, Martinez “experienced retaliation because complainant reported or resisted any form of discrimination or harassment, participated as a witness in a discrimination or harassment claim and as a result was asked impermissible non-job-related questions [and] denied employment benefit or privilege.”
That Martinez acted with such immediacy to his suspension and did not exhibit patience with the investigative process taking place in conjunction with the city’s defense of the charge launched by Martin-Hagan before the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission took several people involved with the city seriously aback.  Best Best & Krieger employs or otherwise has access to a number of investigators who are routinely assigned to look into the circumstances relating to grievances filed by current or former municipal employees against the cities they work for, including charges of sexual harassment and gender discrimination. Those investigators have both a reputation and a demonstrated pattern of generally exonerating the municipal entities represented by Best Best & Krieger of having engaged in or having allowed sexual harassment and gender discrimination to occur in all but the most egregious of cases. It was widely anticipated that the probe of the situation in Redlands relating to Martin-Hagan’s allegations against Martinez would achieve a finding that Martin-Hagan’s complaint could not be sustained, essentially vindicating Martinez.
For that reason, Martinez’s decision to employ Goldberg & Gage in lodging the Department of Fair Employment and Housing complaint against the city as a precursor to a potential civil suit appears, at least at present, to have been a major miscalculation and strategic misstep on his part. Redlands officials were resigned to biting the bullet and meeting the requirement stipulated in his contract that it expend the nearly $900,000 it would take to confer upon Martinez a settlement that would be required to terminate him without cause, if indeed it proved necessary to do so. That he has now filed a complaint with the Department of Fair Employment and Housing and is contemplating action that might escalate the amount of money the city will need to part with to effectuate his separation to $1.5 million, $2 million or $2.5 million and beyond is simply unacceptable to the city. Thus, the city, which was less than a month ago purposed to side with Martinez in the showdown against Martin-Hagan, has been put in the position of establishing cause for Martinez’s firing, which might leave him without a severance at all.
Such cause and multiple pathways for marshalling it exist, the Sentinel is informed.
Ironically, one of those pathways consists of information at the disposal of Martin-Hagan. According to Golds, during her dialogue with McHugh in regard to her resolve to depart from the city and the concomitant effort to obtain a severance settlement, Hagan provided a window on certain improprieties that Martinez had engaged in.  “Hagan informed McHugh that she wanted to leave her employment with the city not only because of her family medical issues, but also because she believe that Martinez was dishonest and lacked integrity in his dealings with the city council relating to the negotiations of the memorandums of understanding with the collective bargaining units,” Golds stated. “She was upset with Martinez’s alleged untruthfulness and the fact that she had to engage in difficult negotiations without his or outside counsel’s support.”
Hagan told the Sentinel that there was evidence to show that during the contentious contract negotiations involving the city’s two primary public safety unions, those representing the city’s firefighters and the city’s police officers, Martinez had been involved in what she called “double dealing,” in which he made demonstrable material misrepresentations to the city council. As the city’s top administrator, Martinez was obliged to represent the city and take its side in the tense back-and-forth between the unions’ representatives and the team representing municipal management, which included Martin-Hagan. Martin-Hagan, however, said that Martinez on occasion militated for the unions. “He was making side deals with the POA [Police Officers Association],” Martin-Hagan said. On another occasion, she said, Martinez had assisted the firefighters union in weakening city management’s resolve. “It was so contentious,” she said. “The union used the tactic of robo-calling. The mayor was really upset about it. Enrique lied to the mayor, and said he didn’t know about it.”
There is another report that buried in the files at City Hall is evidence of self-serving action by Martinez tantamount to embezzlement. Specifically, the Sentinel is informed, among the hundreds of days of leave time Martinez has accrued over the years, there are scores of days within that total which in reality he spent off the job but were not subtracted from his bank of unused leave credit. Upon his retirement, resignation or termination, those leave days are to be cashed out.
Efforts to obtain a response from Martinez with regard to this issue specifically as well as others relevant to this report were unsuccessful.
It is known that information relating to Martinez’s alleged misrepresentations to the city council regarding the union negotiations and the allegations of leave time fraud have been provided to Best Best & Krieger’s investigative team.
There are further reports relating to Martinez pertaining to either alteration or manipulation of the city’s competitive bidding process by which he provided to certain contractors what would have otherwise been large-scale contracts requiring bids and city council consideration and approval of the arrangements for that work. Martinez allegedly instead awarded those assignments piecemeal to the same contractors, bypassing the bidding process. This allowed the work to be carried out with no control as to the rate paid for its completion. Allegations surfaced that there were kickbacks involved in some of those arrangements. In another instance, word surfaced publicly that the company bidding on supplying Redlands with its trash trucks had provided workers in the city’s sanitation division with gratuities. This sent Martinez into a frenetic overdrive, the Sentinel is told, and he showed up at the city yard the next day, where he reportedly was not interested in verifying the truth of the report but rather determining who was responsible for allowing the public to get wind of what happened. According to those present, Martinez became “unglued” when he could not determine which city employee was the source of the leak.
Redlands’ official spokesman, Carl Baker, told the Sentinel, “The city has not taken a position with regards to Mr. Martinez’s claim filed with the Department of Fair Employment and Housing. The notification that was sent to the city was informational, and noted that the case was closed by Department of Fair Employment and Housing without investigation and required no response or action.”
Further, Baker said, “The city has not offered any settlement to Ms. Hagan other than the January 5, 2018, settlement agreement which was executed upon her voluntary resignation from the city and in keeping with the authority provided to the city manager under the municipal code.”
Baker was instrumental in providing to the Sentinel several documents relating to Martin-Hagan’s charge of discrimination that was filed with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Upon doing so, he said, “Aside from providing relevant public records, I will not discuss matters that may be the subject of litigation, so I am unable to respond further to your interpretations of these matters or Ms. Hagan’s actions or motives.”