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There’s no guarantee that some whacko jury wouldn’t decide that the City, and the Department, failed to understand the proper ways to utilize and protect and nurture the new lesbian-firefighter class, and so bear the blame for, not only the other employees’ “damages”, but for wrecking Ms. B’s career and reputation. “Had these neanderthal City and firefighting employees not been such bigots in their degrading and unfair treatment of poor Ms. B, she would never have been so stressed and wearied as to have sought the comfort of emotional involvement with other workers!”, would go the closing argument, and I’ve seen lots of money change hands on weaker words.

Plus, if the City had to fight her in a public legal battle, just think how valuable the resulting deposition and court testimony transcripts would be for all of the firefighters who would be (will be anyway?) starting their own lawsuits against the City because of the “harm” they’ve been forced to suffer at Ms. B’s hands. (”Hands”? Oh, nevermind . . .) Their cases would be so much cheaper and easier to run, plus they’d have probably more evidence of wrongdoing on the part of the City and Ms. B if both of those two entities were duking it out than they could likely get just questioning them on their own.

Those employees are probably going to be suing the City anyway, but at least now the City won’t be paying bigbux lawyers to gather the information for the employees on the City’s legal-fee dime.

Fighting for principle is important, but not when it’s going to cost a ton of public money to do it, and the only benefit you might see out of it is the warm and fuzzy feeling that you got to fire someone. I could see this decision saving at least a few hundred thou (and, realistically, maybe a cool mil or so) of the City’s money, and, at least I’ve heard, they have other things they could spend it on.

No, I can think of many reasons why Rybak isn’t my choice of a leader, but this decision isn’t one of them.

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Also, notice that her “apology” is anything but. She mentions the “appearance of impropriety,” and that the *allegations* have damaged the department, but makes no actual statement of wrongdoing. For the last time people, just like saying “I’m sorry you were offended”, it’s not an apology unless you admit to doing something wrong.

I don’t know if I understand how this could be anything but cut-and-dried. I’m pretty sure that when you fire someone for gross misconduct, sexual harassment (possibly assault), and many other offenses, that there would be no “golden parachute” anyways. Union contracts are ridiculous, but not that ridiculous, I hope.

Lilligren and Remington both said Friday they wanted harsher discipline for Bleskachek, including her termination. “I thought we didn’t go far enough,” Remington said. “Those of us who voted no were willing to roll the dice.”

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