The City of Dallas just settled a wrongful termination / harassment suit with an assistant Dallas fire chief, Roland Gamez, for $1.55-million. One of the keys to settling the suit was the city's ineffective email archiving system.
U.S. District Judge T. John Ward cited "reckless conduct" and he ruled as "sanctionable conduct" for the city's failure to turn over records in a timely manner. (Dallas Morning News) The judge also "accused an assistant city attorney of submitting a false affidavit and obstructing a court order" related to the ability to retrieve documents. Sanctionable conduct can lead to significant penalties.
"Attorneys for the city argued that the problems in turning over records were mistakes caused by a complex e-mail archiving process that was laborious to search," said the report.
"We have to improve all the technology so we have a centralized way of keeping records," Mayor Pro Tem Elba Garcia said.
The email archiving problem not only contributed to the need to settle quickly, it also burdened the city with significant IT costs. The Dallas Morning News also reported that the city hired an outside law firm, which ended up costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. The city also hired a separate lawyer – an expert in attorney grievance cases – to represent the accused assistant city attorney individually.
"Certainly, it is a lot of money," Mayor Tom Leppert was quoted as saying. "There were some issues that came up that weren't related to the key elements of the case."
City Council members said the city was meeting with its technology department to fix the email archiving problem.


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