[This article has been corrected to identify the single complaint among three filed that the state dismissed.]
State officials on Monday dismissed a complaint lodged this past summer by a longtime municipal employee who also has claimed discrimination based on race, age and gender.
Filed on behalf of an African American woman, 59, the complaint—which claimed retaliation on the part of the town—failed to meet “minimum requirements” for a claim, including establishing a connection between “actionable conduct ascribed to the respondent [town] and the complainant’s protected classes,” according to an Oct. 21 Case Assessment Review from the state Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities.
“The present complaint does not satisfy this requirement,” according to the state agency’s review. “There are no facts alleged in the complaint that would tie the actions ascribed to the Respondent to the Complainant’s race, color, age or sex. The complaint therefore fails to state a viable claim of discrimination on these bases.”
The employee has filed three CHRO complaints against the town. The first one, received by the town in April, claims that she had been rebuffed in efforts to increase her work from a part-time administrative assistant to full-time. The complaint alleged that municipal managers actively prevented her from increasing work hours, and also claimed that other workers had received better treatment. That complaint remains under investigation. Another complaint, regarding retaliation, on Oct. 21 received authorization for the employee to file a civil suit. The third complaint is the one that has been dismissed.
In its review, CHRO wrote: “There is no reasonable possibility that investigating the complaint will result in a finding of reasonable cause because to the extent the complaint seeks to assert a claim of retaliation, it is doubtful that the complaint as alleged is sufficient to present such a claim.”
It continued: “Yet even if it did, the only connection presented so far between the Complainant’s protected activity (filing a prior complaint with the Commission) and the alleged retaliatory action (restricting the hours of part-time employees to the 8 hours between 7:30 a.m. and 3:30 p.m.) is the temporal proximity of the action to the filing of the prior complaint. Although temporal proximity can be a strong indicator of a connection between protected activity and retaliatory conduct, the conduct in question must still rise to the level of actionable retaliation. In this case, there is insufficient indication that further investigation will result in the presentation of evidence demonstrative of conduct rising to that level.”
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