NY Daily News – October 01, 2014
by John Marzulli
Not everyone who stands to get a cut of the city’s $98 million settlement of the FDNY discrimination case is happy with how much they’ve been awarded. Judge Nicholas Garaufis will get an earful Wednesday in Brooklyn Federal Court from 37 claimants who signed up to attend a hearing that will allow them to tell the judge they believe they deserve more money. A total of 101 claimants out of about 1,500 have formally filed objections.
The claimants scheduled to speak, whose monetary awards range from $810 to $291,464, will each get two minutes to vent at the so-called “fairness hearing,” which is required before Garaufis signs off on the individual settlement awards.
Those coming to court are FDNY job-seekers who took two written exams that Garaufis has ruled illegally discriminated against minorities after the U.S. Justice Department filed suit against the city in 2007. There are about 1,500 claimants who either weren’t hired as firefighters or had their departmental swearing-in delayed. They’re due to receive settlements for back pay, fringe benefits and interest.
Lawyers representing the federal government, the city and the Vulcan Society of black firefighters have stated in court papers that the monetary awards are “fair, lawful, reasonable, adequate and consistent with the public interest.”
Not so, argues one man, a delayed hire who wrote to Garaufis to say that his $3,549 award “simply doesn’t make sense,” and noted that he should be compensated for overtime pay he would have earned had he become a firefighter sooner.
Another fumed that he was denied his dream of becoming a firefighter and “had to settle” on working as a city Correction Department officer.
The historic settlement agreement, approved by Mayor de Blasio last March, was a dramatic turnaround for the city’s Law Department, which had fought the civil case during the Bloomberg administration.
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