Jackson Free Press

JACKSON — Embattled in recent weeks over numerous legal disputes involving his family's company, Jonathan Lee's campaign is hitting back against incumbent Mayor Harvey Johnson Jr. This week, Lee claimed in an interview that Johnson's administration has been the target of a large number of legal challenges.

City Attorney Pieter Teeuwissen indicated that the Lee camp's charges are a misrepresentation of the facts.

Teeuwissen, who stresses that he represents the city of Jackson and all of its moving parts including the mayor, the Jackson City Council and its members, says his office doesn’t represent any of those individuals unless it directly involves city business.

The city attorney said that when he started in his job during the Frank Melton administration eight years ago, the city had 205 cases in litigation. Right now, the caseload is down to 105. The numbers of lawsuits brought against the city trended down during the last four years, he said, with only about 47 suits filed during the last year. "We've decreased that, over the past eight years, by 50 percent," he said.

To say those numbers are all directly tied to the mayor, though, is not accurate. Many of the suits are "over titles to property," Teeuwissen said, and most of them don't remotely involve the mayor.

The city also has been very successful in appealing lawsuits, he said, a reflection not just on Teeuwissen's office, but because the Johnson administration is running the city better.

"Where we used to have Melton getting us sued directly for his antics, we don't have Johnson doing that," he said. "He's not going around threatening people, walking around with machine guns … tearing up houses."

The city has won roughly 70 percent of suits brought against it on appeal, Teeuwissen said.

Teeuwissen said the only lawsuits that he's seen naming Johnson as a direct defendant is one filed by developer Don Hewitt regarding a dispute over the convention center hotel and another downtown building. The suit also names the Jackson Redevelopment Authority. The Jackson Free Press will provide details on that suit in a separate story.

The city attorney also said that the city (not Johnson) has two lawsuits pending with police officers regarding overtime pay. Those suits go back to complaints from a couple of JPD officers who said they were not receiving the overtime pay they were entitled to. They took their complaints to the U.S. Department of Labor in late 2011. The DOL thoroughly investigated the complaints, said Jackson attorney Jeffrey Reynolds, who represents a group of 41 JPD officers in one of the complaints.

The investigation took "a number of months," Reynolds said. "They interviewed a multitude of superior officers, supervisors, leadership at JPD, as well as regular cops, and found the wrongdoing. They also combed through the record keeping of JPD about all this, which they found to be very poor."

The DOL ruled that the city owes the officers compensation for unpaid overtime. In its ruling, the agency specified how much overtime pay the city owed each of the officers.

A similar DOL investigation occurred in 2006 under the Melton administration, Teeuwissen said, which he learned about "after the fact." The city had been using paper timesheets for decades, which are highly prone to error. In between the two investigations, JPD changed its timesheets, but that did not remedy the situation.

"Timesheets are an inefficient and inaccurate way to keep an employee's time," Teeuwissen said, but JPD didn't effectively upgrade its system after the 2006 investigation. As a result, "the city didn't have records to accurately reflect calculations" in 2011, he said.

Teeuwissen recommended that the city pay the overtime the DOL specified, and Mayor Johnson recommended that JPD modernize its system to electronic timekeeping to avoid future problems. The Jackson City Council approved those recommendations.

The Department of Labor also levied a fine on the city of Jackson. Teeuwissen's office was able to renegotiate the DOL fine because the city had taken "good faith efforts" to remedy the situation, and the agency reduced its fine by nearly 60 percent, from about $65,000 to approximately $27,000.

Currently, the city has two separate lawsuits pending on the overtime issue from roughly 70 Jackson police officers of the approximately 250 cops where the city miscalculated overtime pay. "Some of those amounts were as small as, like, 30 bucks," Teeuwissen said. "Some of them were a couple of thousand dollars, but the vast majority were under $200. … Individuals who have separated from (JPD), the Department of Labor required us to pay those in cash."

The city offered to set up "time banks" for officers still with the department, in line with the DOL agreement, where they would take equivalent time off with pay instead of a cash payout. Many of them agreed; however, Reynolds said that JPD misrepresented the time-bank offer as a "take it or leave it" proposition.

"Two officers were falsely told by (Trivia Jones) at JPD that they might as well go ahead and sign this offer of comp time instead of getting paid the money they were owed because that was all they were ever going to get," Reynolds said.

Most of the officers now suing JPD decided not to take the city's offer; they want the cash, and some want more cash than others. None of his 41 clients have ever been offered any monetary compensation, Reynolds said, "despite the fact that it's irrefutable that they're owed the money."

In January, Teeuwissen went to Reynolds to see if they could reach a deal. After the two lawyers met, Reynolds presented an offer to the city attorney. Although Reynolds did not reveal details of that offer (Reynolds is asking for $120,000 plus $48,000 in attorney fees, The Clarion Ledger reported), the federal Fair Labor Standards Act allows Reynolds' clients to double the amount owed as liquidated damages and to add attorney and court costs to their awards. Reynolds is also asking for three years of back overtime pay instead of two years, an addition allowed if an employer willfully withholds overtime pay.

To date, Teeuwissen has yet to respond to Reynold's offer, which Reynolds said is "very unusual."

"He surely didn't want to really settle the case, otherwise he would have made me (a counter) offer," said Reynolds, who also claims the city attorney told him his agenda is political.

While Teeuwissen attributes the amount of time the media have devoted to this issue to the upcoming municipal elections, he says neither he nor his office has contributed to any mayoral candidate, which he said would be "inappropriate." Reynolds' firm has contributed to Jonathan Lee's campaign, but he says he did not come to a decision until very recently.

The city attorney says he wants to negotiate with all the officers together and handle it at one time. Teeuwissen only learned of the second case during his meeting with Reynolds, and in March, he filed to consolidate the two cases.

"I need all lawyers, all plaintiffs at the table," he said. "It doesn't do the city any good to resolve part of this; we need to resolve all of this."

The second group agreed to mediation, Teeuwissen said, but Reynolds "has steadfastly refused to mediate," a characterization that Reynolds says is "a play on words." Reynolds has indeed declined to mediate, however, and has filed to oppose consolidation of the two cases.

"Our only contention is whether we owe something beyond what the Department of Labor says, or whether we owe what the Department of Labor says," Teeuwissen said. He later added: "The city is prepared and wants to pay those individuals the amount the Department of Labor says we owe them. If they don't want to time bank, and they want cash instead, we want to make that right." He also said that governmental entities have been exempted from doubling overtime amounts under FLSA, and cited the city of Houston as an example.

"I can't, in good faith, go to my client and (recommend) paying more than the Department of Labor says," Teeuwissen said.

He stressed that neither of the suits has anything directly to do with the mayor's office, regardless of who is currently sitting behind the desk. Instead, it's a matter of an antiquated JPD system that doesn't provide administrators with the accurate information they need.

"It was time to modernize it," Teeuwissen said. "… We're making a yeoman's effort to get this straight."

When asked, the city attorney also added context to the issue of the JATRAN headquarters building on Highway 80, which Mayor Johnson's campaign opponents have latched on to as an administrative problem.

"There's no litigation ongoing," Teeuwissen said. The builder, C. Perry Builders, got the job because they were the lowest bidder on the job.

"Somewhere between the architect, the builder and the subcontractors, somebody used a non-American HVAC system," Teeuwissen said. "… The city actually caught that on inspection," and appealed to the federal government to allow the city to keep the system. "The FTA decided, after exhausting the appeals, that it had to be removed" and replaced with an American-made system.

"That's not a reflection on the city," Teeuwissen said. "We're not the architect, the builder or the subcontractor. That's why we hire professionals to do that. … Someone dropped the ball, but not the city."

Litigation is a fact of life for cities, Teeuwissen indicated. "The key is whether the person in charge is creating litigation," he said, something Mayor Johnson doesn't do, unlike his predecessor.