State to pay $2M in Public Safety harassment case
By Jim Dooley
Advertiser Staff Writer
The state has agreed to pay nearly $2 million to settle sexual harassment and discrimination claims filed against two divisions of the Department of Public Safety by three former female employees, according to a bill pending before the Legislature.
Two of the women, Wendy Elkins and Sydney Zalopany, won a $4.1 million jury verdict against the state and four male supervisors two years ago, but have been negotiating a final settlement after the state threatened to appeal.
The final settlement of $1.99 million includes nearly $200,000 in damages to Faith Evans, a former U.S. marshal here and later an official in the Department of Public Safety.
The state Circuit Court jury that originally awarded the $4.1 million could not agree on a verdict for Evans' claims against the state.
The jury dismissed claims brought by a fourth plaintiff, former state prisons medical official Dr. Kim Thorburn.
Zalopany and Elkins have agreed to accept about $600,000 each, with the balance going to pay attorneys fees and expenses.
The original jury verdict included a finding that former Public Safety director George Iranon, Halawa high-security prison warden Clayton Frank, state Narcotics Enforcement Division head Keith Kamita and Ed Howard, a supervisory investigator under Kamita, were personally liable for more than $2 million in damages to be paid to Zalopany and Elkins.
The settlement relieves the four defendants of personal liability for the damages.
The parties were either unavailable or declined to comment yesterday until the Legislature votes on the bill that includes money to pay the settlement.
Also pending at the Legislature is a resolution calling on the state auditor to conduct a management and financial audit of the Narcotics and Enforcement Division, to include an examination of alleged "favoritism and bias," as well as numerous other problems in the office, where both Elkins and Zalopany worked as investigators.
Narcotics Enforcement director Kamita and chief investigator Howard testified in favor of the resolution, each heaping accusations on the other in testimony delivered to the Legislature this month.
Howard told legislators he had knowledge of "mismanagement, fraud, waste, abuse, inefficiency and non-productivity of NED."
He said his support of the resolution was not "because there is a personal grudge between me and the division administrator" or because he wanted Kamita's job.
"The fact is that I don't want the administrator's job; I want him to do his job and do what is right," Howard said in his testimony.
Kamita did not refer to Howard by name in his testimony. He said allegations about the Narcotics Enforcement Division in the audit resolution came from "one disgruntled employee who presently is on suspension for violations of the department's standards of conduct and administrative violations."
Kamita testified that the "disgruntled employee" in March 2001 "made allegations against myself in an attempt to take control of the NED office."
Kamita was suspended last year, and Howard became acting administrator until Kamita returned, cleared of wrongdoing by investigators from the attorney general's office. "Nothing was done to this employee for making these unsubstantiated allegations, and he was allowed to remain in the division," Kamita told legislators.
Testimony favoring the audit resolution by John Reardon, a retired Marine Corps intelligence officer who worked for nine years as a civil and criminal investigator for two state agencies, said he "came to the conclusion that NED was truly a dysfunctional state agency."
