ADVICE REGARDING USERRA VIOLATIONS - CLICK HERE!
168 Days: More Questions
By Ken Snyder
At this point, all my initial questions (listed here) still had no plausible answers. But through my investigation, more questions have came to light:
First of all, there are the questions I mentioned on the previous page:
- Why is every other evaluation they presented as "evidence" filled out completely but my 21 June evaluation?
- Why does no official paperwork inside BPU between people in charge specifically say there was a recommendation to terminate me, but in both examples they sent DOL there were specific papers recommending termination?
- Why did my termination letter from DeLeon need to be sent to two McAnany, Van Cleave & Phillips attorneys?
In my reading of The USERRA Manual and several online papers, I kept noticing that a concept of "temporal proximity" kept being mentioned; this means that it could be reasonably considered that there was a connection between military service and an adverse action (like being terminated) if they occurred close to the same time. Well, is 11 calendar days (8 working days) close enough? How about "where there is disparate (unequal) treatment of certain employees compared to other employees with similar work records" -- Dunn's two witnessed statements versus my three, one of which I did not know about, and dated while I was away on ANG duty? Or how about the absence of a formal termination referral in my employee file, in direct contrast to the "sample" files presented to DOL of how terminations are handled at BPU?
Here are a couple of additional questions I came up with after my investigation:
- The Unified Government of Wyandotte County/Kansas City, Kansas (UG) has their own legal department. Since BPU is an administrative arm of the Unified Government, records (on the Internet) say if there are legal issues at BPU they are supposed to be sent to the UG legal department, and they decide whether to handle this on their own or send it to an outside legal firm (like McAnany, Van Cleave & Phillips). Did this happen, and why is their no record of this in my file?
- BPU (at this point) still had three of the five new signal control cabinets I worked in storage -- at this time over a year has passed since I was terminated, I was that far ahead as far as the Washington Boulevard project was concerned, how then can they say I was "not completing tasks in a timely manner"?
- Who really made out the 21 June evaluation?
- If I was such a screw-up why did DeGraeve let me start on a cabinet for the high-priority Fairfax Trafficway project after my return from ANG duty? Click the image on the right for a larger version.
- How did the DOL come to their conclusion with such little real investigating?
- Just how much of the work I did at BPU has been altered to give credit to someone else? After all, it wouldn't look good on them if everything I alleged turned out to be true, now would it?
Next: The Next Domino To Fall
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