MPC, City, and County Sued for Sex Discrimination & Retaliation
The Knoxville-Knox County Metropolitan Planning Commission has a new director, as of July 1, and current employees are already speaking his praises. This is a good thing, as the agency has just been sued for sexual discrimination and unlawful retaliation by its prior director, along with the city and the county. And court filings imply things could get ugly.
Last summer, as I reported for Metro Pulse, the MPC’s finance director, Dee Anne Reynolds, was fired with no warning by the then-head of the agency, Mark Donaldson, who announced his own retirement about six weeks later.
That timing was no coincidence. At the time of Metro Pulse’s untimely demise, I had been in talks with Reynolds for months, hoping to convince her to go public with the suspected reasons for her firing. I had also filed a massive open records request with MPC.
Since I no longer had a place to publish the story, our talks stopped. But in Reynolds’ lawsuit, filed in federal court on June 23, she alleges a number of unsavory, unethical, and blatantly illegal practices by Donaldson and others at the agency and on the Commission itself in their treatment of both her and other female employees.
The meat of the lawsuit is this: In 2013, MPC planner Elizabeth Albertson (disclosure: a friend) lodged a formal grievance of sex-based discrimination and violations of the Equal Pay Act. MPC has no formal human resources staff, so as the only female at the managerial level, Reynolds helped Albertson through the process. Nothing happened with Albertson’s complaint. (In fact, according to the documents filed with the lawsuit, less than nothing happened.) Yet Donaldson tried to force Reynolds to resign anyway. When she would not, he terminated her for “insubordination”—just as I was about to publish my first story critical of Donaldson’s management.
I should note here that I talked to several MPC employees for that story. None of them were Reynolds (whom at that point, I had maybe talked to once, briefly, while working on an utterly unrelated story). Reynolds doesn’t think it was coincidental that she was fired just hours after a testy interview I conducted with Donaldson in which I asked him about his and other senior staff members’ treatment of women—complaints I had heard from a number of parties. Neither do I.
I should also note here that Donaldson told me last summer no EEO complaints had ever been filed. He even responded to my records request for such complaints with a statement that they didn’t exist. (He also wanted to charge me almost $4,000 for the records he did acknowledge existing. HAHAHA.) However, Albertson’s complaint is included in the exhibits for the lawsuit—a four-page, small-font memorandum dated July 25, 2013, explicitly detailing multiple incidents of gender-based discrimination from 2008 until that date.
These two facts are not part of the lawsuit at this point, but the information contained within the filings is so (allegedly) damning, it doesn’t look good for MPC. In the lawsuit Reynolds alleges that when she and Albertson met with Donaldson to discuss the latter’s complaints, he suggested they “discuss the situation ‘over a beer’ or ‘on the golf course.’”
From there, things go from bad to worse. (Again, allegedly.) In a follow-up meeting in August, Albertson requested that Reynolds, another female to be in attendance, or someone with EEO training be allowed to attend. She was shot down and also lambasted for having approached Knox County HR. Then Reynolds told Becky Longmire, the chair of the actual Commission, what was going on. Nothing happened. Finally, in October, Longmire told Reynolds they could discuss the matter at an MPC Executive Committee meeting.
At the meeting, things got heated, and Reynolds was kicked out. The next day, she sent a memo to Donaldson warning that the lack of clear procedures regarding EEO complaints could jeopardize compliance with federal grants, because federal grants—which are the biggest part of the MPC’s budget—come with strictures. (You know, that whole federal Civil Rights Act thing.) Donaldson responded with a scathing disciplinary memo, in which he states Albertson told him she had not asked Knox County HR to investigate her situation—untrue according to the exhibits attached to the lawsuit.
From there until the date of her firing, Reynolds alleges she was subject to repeated retaliation and intimidation. She filed a complaint with Longmire about the situation last May. On June 24, she was fired.
Reynolds has filed a federal EEOC charge of retaliation, as well as the lawsuit. She is seeking damages, lost wages, and fees and costs. Her lawyer, David Burkhalter, declined further comment at this time, as did Albertson (who is not a named plaintiff in the lawsuit).
Longmire declined comment, citing pending litigation, and referred me to MPC attorney Steve Wise. Surprisingly, Wise had no idea the lawsuit existed.
“That’s news to me,” Wise said. “Are you sure you aren’t talking about the EEOC charge?” (I was not.)
News of the lawsuit was also a surprise to City of Knoxville spokesperson Jesse Mayshark and Knox County spokesperson Michael Grider and, apparently, their respective law departments. Both declined comment.
