Ex-Belfast employee gets mixed signals in job fight

BELFAST – In a legal game of red light, green light, former city employee Shandi L. Daigle picked up conflicting signals in her fight to win back her job at the Belfast Free Library.

In a pair of decisions handed down late last week, Maine Human Rights Commission staff recommended that Daigle’s claim that she was discriminated against because of a medical disability be denied.

On the same day, Superior Court Justice John R. Atwood found there were grounds for a trial to determine whether Daigle should be given her job back.

Both rulings were issued last Thursday.

Daigle was a four-year employee at the library until March 18, when she decided to relocate to Virginia and presented the library with a resignation effective April 4. A few days later she learned about a medical condition – an ovarian cyst – and decided to remain in Belfast. She then informed library director Steve Norman that she wanted to rescind her resignation.

When Daigle discussed the matter with Norman, she was initially hesitant to reveal her medical problem and only did so after being pressed by female members of the library’s board of trustees. When she revealed her problem to Norman, he still refused to take her back.

“She kept telling him she loved the library and loved the job, but he told her he was not convinced that was really true, and then told her she could not rescind her resignation,” said Patricia Ryan, executive director of the rights commission in the staff recommendation.

Daigle then went to the City Council with her complaint.

“This ruffled some feathers because in doing so she skipped the employee grievance process and inadvertently did an ‘end run,'” Ryan said.

The council acknowledged receiving Daigle’s resignation but never formally accepted the document. When the council declined to act on her request to be reinstated, she responded by filing a civil claim against the city in Superior Court and the discrimination claim at the rights commission.

On Thursday, the commission staff recommended that the panel decide “that there are no reasonable grounds to believe that unlawful discrimination in employment has occurred against Shandi Daigle by the City of Belfast because of disability; and that the complaint be dismissed.”

Meanwhile, in Superior Court, Justice Atwood concluded that, if events occurred as Daigle has contended, “it would support her claim that she was discriminated against by virtue of her medical condition, treated differently than other city employees and compelled to leave her employment without lawful authority.”

Atwood was not deciding Daigle’s case in its entirety, but whether he believed there is enough evidence produced on the record to take the matter to trial.

And Belfast City Manager Terry St. Peter, when asked for a response to the rights panel’s staff finding, said, “She quit, and it had nothing to do with a disability.”

Daigle’s attorney, John Carver of Belfast, said this week that while he was disappointed that the human rights staff failed to support his client’s claim, Atwood’s decision strengthened her case against the city. Carver said the city had attempted to persuade Atwood to make a determination without allowing the case to go to trial. Now, Carver said, the court’s decision will enable him to question the participants in the case under oath.

“This lets us get on the inside of the decision making, what the library trustees and director talked about in her case,” Carver said. “Unless we can talk to people under oath, it’s hard to make a case. You have to get sworn testimony.”

The rights commission is scheduled to take up Daigle’s case on Jan. 13.

Atwood indicated that he might set a trial date for Feb. 28.