Story originally printed in the Coulee News or online at www.couleenews.com
Published - Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Three fired firefighters awarded settlement
Three full-time employees of the Edgerton Fire Protection District will share $600,000 — minus union lawyer's fees — as part of a settlement of a five-year legal battle with the district over efforts to form a union.
The district's legal costs may push the bill to the district for trying to keep employees from joining a union to more than $700,000.
The International Association of Fire Fighters, Local 580, announced the settlement Monday. Firefighters Kenneth Crandall, Arnold Lund Jr. and Mark Backes were fired in June 2003 after joining the union and demanding bargaining, according to IAFF spokesman Patrick Kilbane.
The union's discrimination lawsuit was supported in decisions from the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission, the Rock County Circuit Court and the Wisconsin Court of Appeals, ordering the employees reinstated. The Wisconsin Supreme Court refused to review the fire district's petition for review.
The appeals court noted in August that "the record is replete with facts that show the District's personnel manager did not want a union and actively tried to persuade the men not to form one."
Kilbane estimated the firefighters' legal costs to be about $71,000, so the three employees would share about $529,000 in back pay, benefits and interest in the settlement. The mostly volunteer department no longer has any full-time employees, Kilbane said.
The district's legal costs are believed to be in excess of $100,000, though Jim Linsley, who heads the district and was a long-time town official, could not be reached for confirmation. The district's lawyer, Richard Grant, was on vacation, his office said. A legal fund set up by the district reportedly contained more than $121,000 last year.
The district in southern Wisconsin covers the towns of Edgerton, Porter and Fulton in Rock County, the town of Albion in Dane County and the town of Sumner in Jefferson County.
"At a remedy hearing it looked like things were going to get messy for another couple of years," Kilbane said, "so we took a number in between the union's number and the district's number and everybody agreed to leave it at that," he said.
All three of the employees terminated in 2003 found other employment, but not as firefighters, Kilbane said.
All stories copyright 2006 Coulee News and other attributed sources.