First He Sued, And Now Montclair’s Affirmative Action Officer Is Fired

Bruce Morgan’s suspicions that he was being watched began, he says, with small double takes when he would arrive in his Montclair Municipal Building office in the morning — a disquieting sense that the room was not quite as he had left it. A wastebasket perhaps not in its usual spot, papers poking out from the corner of a folder. A calendar book slightly shifted on his desk.

For more than a decade as the township’s affirmative action officer (as well as its head of housing), he had once enjoyed peaceful relations in the corridors at 205 Claremont Ave. But that period was long gone, he knew. In June, Morgan, whose job included investigating accusations of discrimination and retaliation inside the municipality, had himself brought a lawsuit against the township and its interim manager in June of this year, saying that the script had been flipped — that he was now the victim of systematic retaliation.

Still, he recounted for The Torch, even as his foreboding mounted, he wondered to himself, “Could they really be spying on me? Really? Really?”

 Soon, he went on Amazon and ordered a $25 motion sensor camera, roughly 1½  by 1½ inches,  and tucked it discreetly on his desk facing the door.

Then, on Oct. 2, he was summoned upstairs from his first-floor office for a meeting with the director of human resources, Alisha Dawkins, as well as her boss, Amy Monaco. They told him he was being suspended with pay and that he would have to leave the building immediately.

What was the reason, he asked. And they showed him the printout of an assignment he had prepared while at work for a business law class he teaches at Kean University. The exchange turned into a standoff.

“I asked them,” he said, “’how did you get that,’ and they said, ‘don’t worry about how we got it.’”

“I told them straight out,” he said, ‘I know someone has been in my office.’”

But then, a month later, he was fired. He was given no hearing, and just the vaguest explanation in a letter dated Nov. 8, which included no mention of the class assignment.

The letter, from Interim Township Manager, Michael Lapolla, said he was being “terminated effective immediately due to your failure to fulfill the duties and responsibilities of your roles as Section House Officer and Affirmative Action Officer, as well as for violations of the Employee Conduct and Discipline Policy.”

Morgan attributes the padded reasoning for his dismissal to fear among Lapolla and other township officials that in coming depositions for his lawsuit, let alone in open testimony at a possible courtroom trial, they would be compelled to acknowledge they had pried into his personal computer and personal email.

Case law in New Jersey suggests that an employer’s right to take such action is limited and can only happen with written consent.

Township officials, motivated by fear of admitting they had invaded his privacy, Morgan says, were deterred from sending him a Rice Notice, which would push the matter to the Township Council and afford him the right to request a public hearing.

 At tonight’s council meeting, Montclair’s governing body is slated to discuss the fate of Padmaja Rao, the township’s chief financial officer. Last week Rao received a Rice Notice informing her that the council would discuss “potential disciplinary action” stemming from complaints filed against her. This discussion was planned for a closed session unless Rao requested an open hearing, though that stipulation seemed to come with strings attached — that other employees affected by the deliberations would have to sign off on a public airing of the case.

The echoes between Morgan’s plight and Rao’s are unmistakable. Last May, the township settled her whistleblower case for $1.25 million. From the moment Rao filed her lawsuit two years ago, her accusations against former Township Manager Timothy Stafford and former Mayor Sean Spiller have roiled local politics. Her lawsuit described screaming fits by Stafford aimed at her after she tried to get council members from fraudulently receiving state health benefits.

It has been two years since the State Attorney General’s Office launched an investigation into these practices, but no findings have been announced.

Rao’s suit was initially received by some council members with something approaching surprise. But it turns out that two months earlier Morgan had issued a report affirming her accusations that Stafford had created a “hostile work environment” for the CFO.

Similarly, Rao’s suit depicted fiery outbursts from Stafford when she inquired into misconduct in the fire department, involving a firefighter paying colleagues to work his shifts — a practice that may have cost Montclair hundreds of thousands of dollars. Another investigation by Morgan concluded that promotion tests had discriminated against black firefighters and also raised questions about the time-stealing practices. 

In his more than ten years as the affirmative action officer, those two reports are the only ones Morgan ever issued that sided against the township.

“You don’t have to look further than that to know why they’re coming after me,” Morgan says.

 Perhaps it is just a surface impression the township has created, but it has seemingly pursued a curious doubling-down legal strategy in confronting both the Rao and Morgan cases.

Rao had amended her lawsuit to include accusations that Spiller, now running for governor, responded to the suit by retaliating against her, that he tried to create a dossier on her job performance. Morgan’s firing, also coming after his lawsuit, suggests the township is taking a similar course with him.

His suit accuses Lapolla of systematically marginalizing him, limiting Morgan’s input as the housing officer and excluding him from hiring decisions — customary in his position as the affirmative action officer.

Last April, the previous Township Council codified this shift in Morgan’s role when it approved changes to the Employee Handbook, including the elimination of the affirmative action officer from the grievance process. Instead, employees must go directly to human resources.

With Morgan gone, Dawkins is now doubling as both HR director and affirmative action officer. 

“This can only have a chilling effect on employees who want to come forward,” Morgan says. “An important layer is gone.” 

In talking with The Torch, Morgan, more accustomed to keeping confidences than being in the limelight, has stepped out of his normal behind-the-scenes role. For years his first-floor office at the rear of the Municipal Building served as a kind of safe harbor for township employees to come with their grievances. In Morgan they found a large barrel-chested man with an easy laugh and a gentle way of mediating intraoffice friction, who could distinguish relatively minor squabbles from others that might deserve a more fulsome hearing out. 

When he was called upstairs and told by Dawkins and Monaco that he was being suspended on Oct. 2, he was suddenly thrust into terrain familiar to him only through the experiences of employees who had turned to him for help.

“I told them,” Morgan said, “’I know someone has been in my office, and I've been recording the entire time. I've had a motion detection camera for a very long time.’”

Morgan said he did not directly accuse the women, but in his portrayal, both responded defensively, saying they had never been in his office.

Dawkins, Monaco and Lapolla did not respond to emailed questions on why the grievance procedure had been altered, why Morgan’s work was deemed unsatisfactory, and why he had been fired apparently without the investigation he says he had been promised.

They were also asked if they had ever used their work computers on township time for emailing to family or friends, checked Google Maps, perhaps searched for a restaurant review or written anything that did not fall into their official work duties.

They did not respond to these questions either. 

After his meeting with Dawkins and Monaco, the two women escorted him downstairs to his office in a scene that Morgan described as becoming increasingly contentious. They were met by Tony Fan, who, as chief information officer, oversees the building’s tech department.

“See that little camera,” Morgan says he told them. “That’s been recording all of you.”

 Morgan gathered some belongings and headed out the glass doors into the parking lot when he realized, he said, that he had forgotten to retrieve the tiny camera. He returned to find Fan in his office holding the camera, he said.

“He wouldn’t give it back to me,” Morgan said. “I said, ‘I’m not leaving without it,’ and Dawkins said she didn’t want to have to call the police. But they finally gave it to me. They knew they had no choice. It was my personal property.” Morgan declined to say what the camera had captured, and Fan did not answer an email seeking his input.

Yesterday, for the first time since his hurried exit, Morgan was planning to return to the Municipal Building (with the knowledge of Dawkins and others, he said) to collect additional personal items. He described them as photos and knick-knacks, but said he could not remember exactly what else he had accumulated in more than a decade on the job.

“I’m just hoping everything is still there,” he said.