Stephen Mattice is the former police chief of Stafford City, Kansas. He was hired into that role in July 2018, just after the City hired two police officers with no prior experience. Mattice and the two rookie officers constituted the entire police force for the City. He was an at-will employee during his tenure and reported to City Administrator Jami Downing.
Shortly after he started as police chief, Mattice had a conversation with a former Stafford police officer who told Mattice he had reported to the former police chief Doug Brown that an officer had an ongoing sexual relationship with an underage girl. Brown purportedly told the reporting officer that he had disciplined the offending officer. By the time Mattice became chief, Brown had died, and neither of those officers still worked for the City, although the alleged offending officer worked in the Stafford County Sheriff’s Department. Mattice could not find a disciplinary record or any documentation of an investigation in the police department’s files.
Mattice told Downing that he intended to report the allegation to the Kansas Bureau of Investigation (KBI). He would later claim that Downing told him that the matter had already been investigated and resolved. Mattice also believed that Downing was friends with the accused officer. Mattice communicated with a KBI agent, who ultimately concluded that since the girl had been 16 years old during her relationship with the former City officer, no crime had occurred. Meanwhile, Mattice contended that Downing began to treat him coldly, often criticizing his work and micromanaging him. In December 2018, Mattice requested that the mayor remove Downing as his supervisor and presented a detailed letter to the city council blaming Downing for his poor working environment and explained the issue of his KBI report. Days later, the city council directed Downing to ask for Mattice’s resignation. He refused to resign and was terminated.
Mattice sued the City, alleging that he was improperly terminated in violation of a Kansas statute forbidding on-the-job retaliation for reporting likely abuse of a minor to a law enforcement agency. Mattice identified his statements to the city council in December 2018 as the basis of his whistleblowing claim, not his initial statements to Downing about his forthcoming report to the KBI. The trial court granted summary judgment to the City, finding that there was no material fact necessitating a trial, and that Mattice had not alleged a viable whistleblower claim. Mattice appealed to the Kansas Court of Appeals, which reversed.
The Court explained that summary judgment was appropriate if Mattice was unable to prove any of four required elements of a whistleblower claim: “(1) A reasonably prudent person in the position of the employee would have concluded that a coworker or employer was engaged in activity that violated rules, regulations, or the law pertaining to public health, safety, and the general welfare; (2) the employer had knowledge of the employee’s reporting of such a violation before discharging the employee; (3) the employer discharged the employee in retaliation for making the report; and (4) the plaintiff reported the violation in good faith based on a concern regarding the wrongful activity rather than for a corrupt motive.” The Court found the first element to be met because a jury could reasonably conclude that Downing as his co-worker engaged in a course of conduct that impeded his ability to report suspected abuse and otherwise perform his job duties. The second element was met because Mattice’s alleged whistleblowing was to the city council, which subsequently directed his termination. The fourth element was met because the City offered very little evidence supporting its argument that Mattice’s complaints about Downing to the city council were a “contrivance designed to divert from the questions about the quality of his work.”
The Court spent the most effort analyzing element three – whether Mattice’s termination could be reasonably deemed retaliatory. The main evidence it considered in concluding that a jury could side with Mattice on this point was the mere four days which elapsed between his complaints about Downing to the city council and his termination. Although the Court noted that the City’s explanation that it terminated Mattice for poor performance was facially legitimate, the Court found that a jury could conclude that this excuse was pretextual. Namely, the City failed to produce any negative performance reviews of Mattice in the time leading up to his termination. The city council relied on unsigned statements by Mattice’s subordinates in its decision, but the Court declined to accept these statements because neither officer verified the truth of the statements via affidavit or deposition testimony. The city council also did not follow up with Mattice based on his subordinate’s criticisms or conduct further investigation into their claims.
Taken together, the City failed to categorically defeat the inference of retaliation based on the temporal proximity between Mattice’s statements to the city council and his discipline. Having found that a jury could side with Mattice on each element, the Court reversed the lower court’s granting of summary judgment to the City, allowing Mattice’s case to proceed.
Mattice v. City of Stafford, No. 126,397, 2024 WL 3634294 (Ct. App. Kan., 2024).