Civil rights advocates seek injunction in federal court against Dallas convention hotel construction

By Dave Levinthal/Reporter

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1:57 PM on Fri., Mar. 13, 2009 | Permalink
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A group of Dallas civil rights advocates, led by the Revs. Peter Johnson and Ronald Wright, is asking a U.S. federal court to bar Dallas City Hall from beginning construction of a Dallas Convention Center hotel.
The group, which filed a lawsuit today in U.S. federal court, wants hotel construction delayed until Dallas conducts a scheduled May 9 referendum on a City Charter amendment proposition seeking to prohibit Dallas from owning a convention center hotel, as it plans to do.
The lawsuit lists the City of Dallas, Dallas Convention Center Hotel Development Corporation and Mayor Tom Leppert as defendants and accuses them of failing to “submit for preclearance from the United States Attorney General or the United States District Court for the District of Columbia their plan to ignore the pending Charter Amendment election called for by Plaintiffs and other minority citizens of Dallas, and to commence the sale of potentially encumbering bonds and construction of the Dallas Convention Center Hotel.”
Says James Vagnini, a lawyer for Wright and Johnson: “This is a slap in the face to voters what the mayor is trying to do. This issue should go to a vote in May without questions about the outcome mattering.”
(CLICK HERE to read a copy of the federal complaint.)
Leppert blasted the lawsuit, calling it “ridiculous.”
“The Dallas City Council just voted to put the proposition on the ballot for the May 9th city elections,” the mayor wrote in a statement. “Additionally, the election has already been submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice for preclearance as is required by law. We are going forward with the vote.”
Dallas’ First Assistant City Attorney Chris Bowers vowed to aggressively fight the suit, saying the city will likely file a motion to dismiss it.
“We strongly deny that the city is or will be violating the Voting Rights Act,” Bowers said.
It is unclear whether actual construction of the convention hotel will begin before the May 9 vote, although pre-construction demolition work has already commenced on the hotel site, bounded by Young, Market and Lamar streets downtown.
Leppert and many other city officials have said they want construction to begin as quickly as possible — a stance that’s drawn sharp criticism from hotel opponents.
But a turbulent bond market may prevent the city from seeking financing for the more than $500 million project. Dallas is seeking a 5.5 percent interest rate on revenue bonds that would be used to construct the hotel — a rate it is unable to procure today.
Dave Cook, Dallas’ chief financial officer, said earlier this week that Dallas wouldn’t be prepared to sell bonds for at least several more weeks, and possibly several more months. “A lot depends on the market,” he said.
Today’s legal action is the third time in a month that hotel opponents have taken action against the city in federal court.
In February, the Citizens Against the Taxpayer-Owned Hotel organization sought in federal court to block the Dallas City Council from approving hotel developing and operating agreements.
The court rejected one complaint and Citizens Against the Taxpayer-Owned Hotel voluntarily withdrew another, and ultimately, the Dallas City Council approved the hotel’s development and operating agreements.
Original Article: https://cityhallblog.dallasnews.com/archives/2009/03/civil-rights-advocates-seek-in.html

Contractor at Airports Settles Suit in Bias Case

By ERIC O’KEEFE
Published: March 12, 2008

DALLAS — Allied Aviation Services, which fuels planes at airports nationwide, agreed on Tuesday to pay $1.9 million to settle a discrimination lawsuit begun by 15 black and Hispanic employees at its Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport facility who said they had been forced to endure racial slurs and other harassment.

Matt Slocum/Associated Press: Eric Mitchel and Diana Ochoa spoke Tuesday in Dallas on the settlement of a discrimination lawsuit against Allied Aviation Services. Ms. Ochoa is the widow of Francisco Ochoa, a plaintiff

The company, which did not acknowledge any wrongdoing, also agreed to conduct sensitivity and diversity training for all of its employees in the United States for the next three years. The settlement was announced at a news conference outside the Dallas district office of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which had filed a suit on behalf of the workers.
The settlement is the largest race and national origin discrimination case ever resolved by the Dallas office, Suzanne M. Anderson, the agency’s supervisory trial lawyer, said.
“What made this case so repulsive was not just the egregious conduct against blacks and Hispanics by their co-workers but also management’s acquiescence to the harassment,” she said in a prepared statement.
The company could not be reached for comment at its headquarters in New York. An operator at its facility at the Dallas/Fort Worth airport said, “I’ve been instructed that there is no comment from this station.”
A former Dallas Cowboys running back, Eric Mitchel, began the lawsuit after finding his name and the names of four other black employees on a bathroom wall underneath the title “hit list,” which included a racial epithet.
He said at the news conference that he had reported the threat to the airport police but had been told by Allied management “if I didn’t like what was going on, I could leave.” It was one of many incidents that Mr. Mitchel said had caused him to compare the work environment at Allied to that of a modern-day plantation.
Other Allied employees cited a pattern of discrimination and civil rights violations. Ku Klux Klan membership cards were routinely brandished by white employees, and nooses and drawings of swastikas were commonplace, according to their suit. When boarding shuttles, Hispanics were told to ride in the back of the bus, it said.
Carl Gaines, a black employee, discovered racial slurs and other derogatory remarks on the fuel panel of an American Airlines jet he was servicing, the suit said. To his surprise, he realized that the epithets singled him out by name.
Francisco Ochoa, a Hispanic employee, went into a meeting with a supervisor to discuss the conditions, only to find himself depicted in a racially offensive cartoon on display under glass on the manager’s desk, according to the suit. The mental anguish so traumatized Mr. Ochoa, a former marine, that he was later hospitalized for two weeks, said Sara W. Kane, a lawyer who worked on the case. Mr. Ochoa died of cancer two years ago.
Legal work on the case began four years ago after Mr. Mitchel found the response from Allied management unacceptable. After seeking legal counsel from a lawyer, James A. Vagnini, he was joined by seven other employees as parties to the lawsuit. That number eventually grew to 15. Six still work for the company.
“This is certainly one of the most, if not the most egregious case we’ve ever seen,” said Ms. Kane, a partner with Mr. Vagnini at Valli Kane & Vagnini in Garden City, N.Y., which represented the employees along with DiNovo Price Ellwanger in Austin, Tex. “The level and the depth that management was involved sets it apart from all other cases.”
Ms. Kane added that once the commission had completed its investigation into the case, it brought its own lawsuit against Allied on behalf of the employees. “That almost never happens,” she said.
Allied Aviation Services fuels 1.8 million commercial flights and handles close to six billion gallons of jet fuel each year, according to its Web site. It has operations at 24 major airports in North America, the Caribbean and Latin America, including the New York area’s three main airports.