After nearly five years of litigation, two former lawyers who worked for and sued the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources settled their lawsuit with the agency over claims they were retaliated against after raising issues with the way the agency handled bids.
Former DHHR executives Susan Perry and Jennifer Taylor filed suit in 2012 against DHHR, former acting DHHR secretary Rocco Fucillo, deputy DHHR secretary Warren Keefer and Bryan Rosen, who headed the agency's purchasing office.
The DHHR and other defendants named in the lawsuit entered into a settlement agreement with Perry and Taylor earlier this year. The settlement amount is public, but it's not included in documents filed in the case. Settlement agreements involving government agencies in West Virginia are public record, the state Supreme Court ruled in 1986, in response to a lawsuit filed by The Charleston Gazette against a former Kanawha County sheriff.
Parkersburg lawyer Walt Auvil, who represented Perry and Taylor in the case, said this week that he couldn't discuss the settlement agreement. Charleston lawyer Charles Miller, who represented defendants in the case, didn't return a phone call Wednesday for comment.
A spokeswoman for the state Department of Administration said when she tried to obtain the amount of the settlement this week through the state Board of Risk Management, she was told that, while a settlement had been entered into between the parties, not all required documents had been signed in order for it to be made public.
"It's not unusual. Sometimes it takes a little bit of time. Until everything is signed-off, we can't provide any additional information," said spokeswoman Diane Holley-Brown on Wednesday. The settlement was reached almost a year after the Supreme Court ruled in April 2016 that Kanawha County Circuit Judge James Stucky erred when in June 2014, he granted the DHHR's motion for summary judgment and threw out the lawsuit.
Stucky should have let the whistleblower claims alleged in the complaint move forward, according to the 43-page opinion filed by justices. However, Stucky was correct to throw out Perry and Taylor's claims involving retaliatory discharge, gender discrimination and false light invasion of privacy claims.
Perry, a former deputy secretary for the DHHR, and Taylor, a former administrator, claim they were fired for raising concerns about inconsistencies in the evaluation and scoring of the bid packages for advertising contracts.
After the Supreme Court returned the case to him, Stucky had set a trial date for April 10.
Reach Kate White at kate.white@wvgazettemail.com, 304-348-1723 or follow @KateLWhite on Twitter.