Disclosing Records, Confidentiality, and Termination of Employment
Q: As an appraiser in a county Assessor’s office, I made public non-confidential elements of property records showing conflicts of interest, favoritism, and arbitrary assessments. I first submitted a taxpayer complaint to the Board of Supervisors (R&T Section 1362). I next made public the copy provided to me by the county clerk. All of this was done following consultation with county counsel… without any objections or cautions whatsoever.
I’m now being terminated under the pretense of having publicized “confidential” information.
A: To the extent that you were fired as a result of, or in retaliation for, speech about matters that were not confidential, that would certainly seem to raise First Amendment concerns. In Pickering v. Board of Education, 391 U.S. 563 (1968), the US Supreme Court held that a public school teacher was wrongfully fired by his school board after he wrote a letter to the editor of a newspaper attacking the board’s funding priorities and suggesting mishandling of a prior bond issue proposal.
The Court found that the teacher’s statements were either substantially accurate and not demoralizing or otherwise injurious to the district, or innocently rather than deliberately inaccurate, and thus protected as a citizen’s expression on matters of public concern. See also Harman v. City of New York, 140 F. 3d 111 (2d Cir. 1998) (an executive order restricting contact between the media and employees of the city’s social services agencies violated the employees’ free speech rights); Providence Firefighters Local 799 v. City of Providence, 26 F. Supp. 2d 350 (D.R.I. 1998) (court found that a fire department policy of requiring firefighters to obtain permission before speaking with the media violated the First Amendment).