Lawsuits
Suit claims Elbert County, commissioners spied on employee’s computer, made false claims
ELBERT COUNTY, Colo. – Elbert County and its county commissioners face a federal lawsuit alleging they spied on the county’s director of community development and planning’s every move over a several months last year.
Kyle Fenner filed the suit against the county and its board of commissioners in early March in U.S. District Court of Colorado. In it, she claims that the county commissioners made themselves her supervisor after they spent several months monitoring everything she did on her work computer.
The suit alleges that the board of county commissioners voted to become Fenner’s supervisor in December 2015, but that the county had actually been monitoring her computer since September 2015, allegedly “collecting over 50,000 screen shots” from her work computer.
It’s unclear in the suit exactly why the county started monitoring her computer in the first place, but in April 2016, Elbert County Attorney Wade Gateley hired Mountain States Employers Council, Inc. (MSEC) to conduct a “workplace investigation” on Fenner’s internet usage during work hours on her county computer, whether she used the computer for personal or commercial gain, or if she “made ‘demeaning’, ‘defaming’ and ‘disparaging’ comments about county employees or elected officials from February 1, through April 11, 2016,” according to the suit.
“The IT investigation was basically a surveillance tool that they had started running on my machine, and for about 70 calendar days, they snapped a picture of my desktop under every two seconds,” Fenner told Denver7.
It says that the investigation into her computer usage was discussed at a public work session on April 11 last year, at which Gateley said that Fenner was “under investigation” for “possible criminal activity.”
A week later, Fenner’s name was also publicly discussed as being involved in a “criminal investigation,” according to the suit. And on May 10, County Commissioner Robert Rowland emailed a listserv saying that Fenner was the subject of an investigation and asked the recipients to attend a public meeting about the investigation.
According to the lawsuit, Rowland then in June told public citizens to use open records law to look up her case with the district attorney’s office, whom he had sent the collection of records from Fenner’s computer.
“I felt so violated knowing that Commissioner Rowland was going to have a digital copy of 50,000 screenshots of me that I created,” Fenner said.
But the special counsel investigation into Fenner’s computer usage had wrapped up on May 12, according to the suit, and found that she had indeed made a “demeaning, disparaging, or insulting” comment via a private email service on her work computer.
But the special counsel also stated that though she should be reprimanded for the comment and reminded of county computer rules, that the comments Fenner made weren’t made “pursuant to [Fenner’s] official duties; did not affect in a substantial way [Fenner’s] ability to efficiently provide services as an employee; and could arguably address a matter of public concern.”
According to the suit, the special counsel also exonerated Fenner of any other alleged violations, and recommended that the board and county correct the record to show Fenner was never close to facing criminal charges.
Fenner is seeking compensatory, statutory and punitive damages for humiliation, anger, anxiety, emotion distress, frustration and embarrassment, according to the suit.
Rowland is no longer a county commissioner. He declined to seek re-election last November. Denver7 stopped by his house Wednesday for comment, but was told to get off his property.
Current commissioner Danny Wilcox told Denver7 the situation surrounding the suit was “frustrating” but said he could not comment further on specifics of the case.
Denver7 requested details on expenditures related to the investigation into Fenner’s computer usage on April 6. An Elbert County records custodian told Denver7 Wednesday the documents were in the mail.
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Two Mountain View police officers indicted over alleged defrauding of CDOT grants
JEFFERSON COUNTY, Colo. – Two Mountain View police officers have been indicted over allegations they falsified field reports and time cards in order to get paid thousands of extra dollars in grant money from the state.
Leonard Portugal, 47, and Ricardo Hernandez, 43, face a combined 35 counts in the indictment, including attempting to influence a public servant, forgery, embezzlement of public property and theft.
The indictment alleges that the two officers utilized Mountain View’s ability to receive grants from CDOT for traffic enforcement in the small home rule municipality near Lakeside and Wheat Ridge to pocket the money by making false timecard reports.
Since Mountain View is so small, it receives three grants via CDOT in order to pay overtime to officers for doing patrol work in the town.
Portugal was in charge of applying for the grants, organizing officers to work the extra shifts and reporting the required stats back to CDOT.
The First Judicial District Attorney’s Office says each officer in the department was required to tally his or her grant-funded overtime and report it to the police chief, who would pass the sheets on to Portugal to compile. But it says that the documentation sometimes bypassed the chief and went straight to Portugal.
The indictments claim that between January 2015 and June 2016, Portugal was paid out $24,935 in grant-funded overtime money that he didn’t earn. He allegedly submitted at least 31 false field activity reports and time sheets.
Hernandez allegedly falsified his overtime hours and was paid out $2,735 he wasn’t afforded.
Both men turned themselves in to the Jefferson County jail on Wednesday and had their bonds set at $10,000.
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Lawyer: ‘New evidence’ shows Aurora botched 2014 marijuana license lottery
AURORA, Colo. – A Denver-area marijuana company says it has new evidence the city of Aurora and the city’s marijuana enforcement division didn’t give it fair treatment when it tried to get one of the city’s marijuana licenses in August 2014.
The suit by Visaj Unity, LLC, which operates as Metro Cannabis, was first filed in late 2014 after the company was denied one of the Aurora Ward 2 licenses to operate a cannabis shop. Metro Cannabis now operates at least three other dispensaries in the Denver area, which operate under the name Silver Stem Fine Cannabis.
At the time, Aurora was using a lottery process to determine which bids would get the four shops in the ward.
The lawsuit has maintained that Metro Cannabis had actually tied with another applicant, Mountain States Group I LLC (MSG), but that the city’s code and the Aurora Marijuana Enforcement Division (AMED) wouldn’t allow for a tiebreaker despite the tie.
And Metro Cannabis maintains in a new filing that it has proof that AMED created the tie in the first place by rounding up the other company’s score, which accounted for various proposals made by each company as to how they would operate their shop should they be granted a license.
That new evidence, attorney Bob Hoban claims, shows that one of three reviewers who was tasked with deciding businesses’ scores in the lottery was actually an Aurora employee and thus not an “independent reviewer.” Hoban claims that the Aurora employee’s involvement in the process means Metro Cannabis did not receive due process in its application being evaluated.
Hoban also says that the city of Aurora has admitted it made a mistake in rounding up MSG’s score, and that it has “steadfastly refused to correct its error.”
“It is not plausible to believe that each of these…data entry errors randomly happened to be outcome-determinative in the absence of any intentional manipulation of scores by the AMED,” Hoban wrote in his latest court filing.
He also claims that AMED showed bias toward the owners of Metro Cannabis, whom were investigated in 2009 by Greenwood Village police for possible discrepancies involving a medical caregiver operation, despite no charges ever being filed.
“It appears that the AMED decided that Visaj should not be granted a license even though the AMED’s rules did not allow the AMED to take away points or otherwise deny an application based on criminal charges that were dropped by the prosecuting agency,” the filing says.
It also says that instead of hiring an independent attorney to act as a hearing officer in license appeals, the city instead hired Jason Batchelor, who oversees AMED, to be the hearing officer in Metro Cannabis’s case.
“Aurora’s reticence to provide pertinent information before, during and after the Oct. 13, 2014 administrative hearing demonstrates a calculated effort to deny Visaj a meaningful opportunity to challenge denial of the license,” Hoban wrote.
And still, Hoban argues, the city is breaking its own rules that put a two-year limit on how long a license winner can sit on a license before it has to start building its new facility. The filing says 3LP, one of the companies that received a license at the time, still has not broken ground on the facility it proposed back then.
The filing claims that Aurora city code has no remedies to allay the problem, and claims violations of the Colorado Constitution in that the company was depraved of its due process.
“The city of Aurora admits it made a mistake, but because the Aurora code doesn’t say what to do in cases of such mistakes, they don’t have to fix it,” co-owner Stan Zislis said.
A jury trial in the case is set for next Monday, April 24 in Adams County District Court. A spokesperson for the city of Aurora says the city does not comment on pending litigation.
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Amid allegations of unpaid taxes, neo-Nazism, and sex offender, Denver furry convention canceled
DENVER – Fur is flying between different sects of a niche community of Coloradans over allegations of neo-Nazism, unpaid taxes and fake legal threats that has led to the cancellation of the popular annual “furry” convention in Denver.
The journey down the furry wormhole started with a tweet Monday night from JJ MacNab, a Forbes writer who covers anti-government extremism. Continue reading
As incidents involving body cameras increase, top manufacturer pushes them for all police
DENVER – Questions about the purpose of police body cameras and when their captured content should be publicly released have been renewed after the chief of police for Fort Collins said Sunday he wouldn’t release body camera video of one of his officers slamming a woman to the ground during an arrest until after an investigation.
The Fort Collins Police Department is one of a handful of Colorado law enforcement agencies that have bought body cameras for their officers, and one of few in the state that has pledged to outfit all of its officers with the technology. Continue reading
Gorsuch could cast key votes on these high-profile cases, could take up Colo. cake shop case
DENVER – Colorado’s Neil Gorsuch is now the ninth U.S. Supreme Court justice, and he will immediately be thrown into several high-profile cases in which he could cast the deciding vote.
The Supreme Court has for more than a year operated with just eight justices after Justice Antonin Scalia died unexpectedly in February 2016.
First up for Gorsuch and the full-bench court will be a case out of Missouri involving a church’s claim that its religious freedom is being violated by the state’s ban on public money going to religious organizations.
In Church of Columbia v. Pauley, the church argues that the state’s denial of public money to help build a playground violated the U.S. Constitution.
Gorsuch could also be called on to decide six cases argued last year should the other eight justices not be able to come to a majority conclusion. He would be called on to participate in new hearings on the cases and possibly break a 4-4 tie, but cannot issue decisions in any cases that do not end in a tied vote.
Among those cases are one involving a Mexican family suing a U.S. Border Patrol agent who shot their son across the Texas border.
There were two finalized 4-4 votes that resulted from Scalia’s death: one that involved public unions, and one that involved the detainment of undocumented immigrants, according to the New York Times.
The AP reports that those cases included one involving the rights of detained immigrants, and others involving discrimination involving housing and redistricting.
And the Supreme Court is set to hold private conferences on April 13 to decide what other cases it might soon hear.
Among the possibilities is the case involving the Masterpiece Cakeshop in Lakewood, whose owner, Jack Phillips, has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review his case after a lower court ruled that Phillips discriminated against a gay couple who wanted a wedding cake in 2012.
Phillips has long claimed that as a Christian, he has the religious freedom to deny business to same-sex couples.
The Colorado Supreme Court last August declined to review the case, agreeing with a Colorado Court of Appeals decision that said the shop could continue to enforce its religious beliefs, but not while operating as a business in Colorado.
The U.S. Supreme Court could also take up a gun rights case out of San Diego in which the plaintiff argues the Second Amendment allows people to carry guns openly outside of their home, as well as a voter rights case involving voter identification and redistricting out of North Carolina at the April 13 conference. Four justices would have to vote to take up each case for a full court hearing.
Gorsuch, 49, is now the youngest Supreme Court justice, and Republicans hope that he will tip the majority back to conservatives, as was often the case with Scalia on the bench.
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Bellco Credit Union sued for alleged mortgage loan discrimination against women on maternity leave
DENVER – Greenwood Village-based home loan lender Bellco Credit Union faces accusations it broke federal fair housing laws by not giving mortgage loans to women while they were on or about to go on maternity leave.
Bellco Credit Union was sued by the Denver Metro Fair Housing Center in March in U.S. District Court of Colorado for allegedly discriminating against people based on their sex and familial status, the suit says. It was assigned earlier this month to a judge, and a scheduling conference in the case is set for May 26.
Read the lawsuit in full by clicking here.
According to the suit, Bellco has continued to deny mortgage loans to women who are either on or facing impending maternity leave until the women return to work for at least 30 days, which DMFHC says is a direct violation of both state and federal fair housing laws, as well as underlying rules for loans issued by Fannie Mae.
Bellco has more than 20 branches across Colorado.
Over a period of several months last year, DMFHC used five women to test Bellco’s rules by applying for mortgage loans either while they were already on maternity leave, or by saying they were about to go on it.
The women were all white in order to control the test, the suit says, and all had credit scores in the mid-700s, household incomes with two earners and money in their savings. Two of the women were not on our about to go on maternity leave so as to control the test, the suit says.
In all three cases in which the women said they were on or about to go on maternity leave, loan representatives from Bellco told the women they would have to return to work and provide one month’s worth of pay stubs in order to close on a home, despite some of them having alternate incomes from their husbands and, in one case, $72,000 in savings, according to the suit.
In one case, one of the Belco workers “unequivocally communicated that women on maternity leave must return to work as a threshold condition to potentially qualify for a home mortgage loan from Bellco,” according to the suit.
But the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has issued numerous guidance memos over the past seven years showing that women do have the right to obtain a mortgage loan while on maternity leave.
From 2010 to 2014, HUD received approximately 190 complaints regarding home loans and pregnancy or parental leave, around 40 of which were settled by the end of 2014, according to the suit.
When HUD settled with Houston-based lender Cornerstone Mortgage Company in 2011, an assistant secretary for HUD said that explicitly.
“Pregnancy is not a basis to deny or delay a loan. It’s just that simple,” HUD Assistant Secretary for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity John Trasvina said at the time. “Mortgage professionals may verify income and other resources and have eligibility standards, but they may not single out women on maternity leave to deny or delay loans that they are otherwise eligible for.”
Under the federal Fair Housing Act, people seeking home mortgage loans are protected from being discriminated against based on their sex or familial status (including pregnancy) if they can “demonstrate that she intends to return to work and can otherwise continue to meet the income requirements to qualify for the loan.”
And in 2014, HUD said that “borrowers scheduled to be on leave at the time the first mortgage payment is due may rely upon any combination of income received during leave or liquid assets not otherwise required for the loan to meet the underwriting standards,” according to the suit.
The test that DMFHC undertook met all the return-to-work requirements and minimum loan requirements necessary under law, according to the suit.
Just last July, Citizens Bank settled with HUD over accusations similar to those levied now against Bellco. And Fannie Mae, which underwrites guidance for Bellco, said in 2013 that “a lender should consider a borrower’s income while on leave” and in some cases in which the family leave payment is less than a woman’s normal income, that a lender “should take into account the borrower’s savings as available to supplement the borrower’s income.”
“Given this public guidance from HUD and Fannie Mae, Bellco should have known that its policy is unlawful,” the suit says.
The suit asks a federal judge to enjoin, or block, Bellco from continuing its practices. DMFHC claims it has been injured because it has had to “divert scare time, money and resources” to investigate Bellco in order to meet its missing “of eliminating housing discrimination and promoting housing choice for all people in the Denver metropolitan area.”
“Bellco knew or should have known that its policy of denying home mortgage loans to women who are using maternity leave was unlawful and illegal,” the suit says.
It also asks the judge to award both punitive and compensatory damages for Bellco’s alleged violations of the Fair Housing Act and Colorado Fair Housing Act, as well as attorneys’ fees and other reasonable costs.
“The denial of home mortgage loans to women who are otherwise credit worthy because they on maternity leave is not only unlawful, it severely limits women and families with children the ability to purchase or refinance a home and all the benefits that come with homeownership,” said DMFHC Executive Director Arturo Alvarado.
Bellco issued a statement Monday in response to the lawsuit saying the lawsuit has no merit:
“For more than 80 years, Bellco has served as a trusted partner to our members in this community. Bellco has never knowingly engaged in any discriminatory lending practices of any kind. In particular, Bellco’s policies forbid any kind of discrimination based on the sex or familial status of applicants, including pregnancy and maternity leave. Our attorneys are investigating the specific allegations in the complaint and will respond to them in court. But we are confident that the lawsuit has no merit.”
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EPA pays out $54K more to Colorado for Gold King Mine reimbursement costs
DENVER – Colorado and some local jurisdictions in the southwestern part of the state are getting fractions of what was initially sought in reimbursement money from the Environmental Protection Agency for the August 2015 Gold King Mine spill, but received another $54,000 Thursday.
The EPA said in January that it would not fully repay the 73 claims from both governments and private entities worth $1.2 billion for the spill, which was caused by EPA contractors and hampered communities in southwest Colorado, northwest New Mexico and southeast Utah for months. Continue reading
ICE agents illegally detained Colorado US citizen for days because he was Hispanic, lawsuit claims
DENVER – A Gunnison man born in Colorado was picked up by immigration officers after a court appearance and illegally detained in immigration detention centers across the state for days, according to two newly-filed federal lawsuits.
Bernardo Medina, 22, is Hispanic and was born in Montrose in May 1994. He and his parents moved to Mexico before his first birthday, which is where he spent much of his early life. But Medina moved back to the Western Slope when he was 18, settling in Gunnison. Continue reading
Trump’s new immigration executive order: 7 differences from first travel ban
DENVER – President Donald Trump signed a new executive order on immigration Monday that revises his initial order that banned immigrants from seven predominantly-Muslim countries.
The new order contains some differences from the initial order, which was signed in January, but was challenged by federal judges in Washington and Minnesota. The suspension of the order was upheld by a federal appeals court. Continue reading