Last summer, as the Austin fire union was preparing to represent one of its members at a disciplinary hearing, department officials permitted union president Bob Nicks to review confidential documents in the case under a provision of the city’s labor contract with firefighters.
With a couple of clicks, Nicks secretly downloaded the information onto his personal laptop — but says he disclosed what he’d done a few days later to top department officials.
But his actions led to an unusual punishment from Fire Chief Rhoda Mae Kerr: She banned him from representing any other firefighter at a disciplinary hearing for more than a year — a punishment that strikes at the core of one of his primary duties as union president.
The issue highlights a dispute that has escalated between Kerr and Nicks over the past several years.
Nicks has appealed, and an arbitrator is being brought in this week to determine whether Kerr has the power to stop him from representing union members, and if so, whether that punishment is fair in this case.
“I think there is a better way I could have done it,” Nicks said Tuesday. “I was very motivated to help the firefighter who I thought was going to get inappropriate punishment. We self-disclosed that we had the documents to the chief of staff for the fire department and let them know we were only trying to use them to make the investigation more accurate.”
Nicks said the information he downloaded helped him show that internal investigators were not accurately portraying what witnesses told them during the review.
He added that he would have had access to all the information he copied in coming weeks, and that “the evidence was kept confidential among a small group of people.”
A department spokeswoman Tuesday that, “given that the arbitration is a legal proceeding, Chief Kerr is going to reserve any comments about it until after its conclusion.”
The most recent friction arose over the discipline of Lt. James Crowther.
Crowther agreed to a 60-day suspension after he was threatened with termination last year in connection with neglect of duty allegations that he had deliberately taken a fire engine out of service at inappropriate times, according to a disciplinary memo signed by the fire chief.
The memo states that Crowther also on several occasions would reduce the urgency of response levels for medical calls, that he violated conduct policies by questioning the need for firefighters’ presence at medical calls, and that he refused to accompany medics to meet patients, the memo said.
Crowther’s suspension touched off a rift between Kerr and the union, with growing criticism from Nicks. A week after Crowther’s suspension, the union voted to censure Kerr over, among other things, recent disciplinary action. At the time, Kerr said the Nicks was waging a “one-sided misleading personal vendetta.”
Nicks’ animus toward Kerr continued to grow after leadership at the fire department put in place a more strict disciplinary system after they saw a spike in crashes involving fire department vehicles. Since the policy was enacted in September, it has led to the suspensions of 30 firefighters, including eight lieutenants and one captain.
When the Statesman first reported the policy change in December, Nicks criticized it. While all of the punishments were relatively light suspensions of two to 12 hours, Nicks said it was humiliating good firefighters and destroying morale.
Nicks said the disciplinary action against him is to continue until the end of the current labor contract between the department and union, which is set to expire this fall.
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