The first woman to become a battalion chief for the Salt Lake City Fire Department — and who was later demoted and fired after sharing concerns about her superiors — is a step closer to meeting her former bosses in court.
The United States 10th Circuit Court of Appeals largely denied Salt Lake City’s request for summary judgment against former employee Martha Ellis, in a ruling released Tuesday.
Attorneys for the city said Tuesday they cannot comment as the case is ongoing, and Ellis’s lawyers did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Ellis first filed a suit against the city and three fire officials — current fire chief Karl Lieb, former fire chief Brian Dale and former deputy fire chief Robert McMicken — in Utah District Court in October 2016. In that suit, she claimed she faced retaliation, sex discrimination, disability discrimination and a hostile work environment. She argued that she felt she was passed up on promotions she was more qualified for, and court documents quote her superiors using disparaging language while speaking about her.
Court documents also say she brought it to city officials’ attention that department executives were quietly using paid city time to do other things, and counting three 12-hour shifts as a full 40-hour work week for certain employees. The documents also say she raised concerns over bike lanes that did not meet fire code and about a fire station that she had told officials lacked smoke detection before it caught fire in March 2015.
In March 2016, Ellis was placed on paid administrative leave, according to the original lawsuit, and was escorted out of the building in front of her coworkers — something the lawsuit said was not common for battalion chiefs unless they were facing serious allegations.
Later, the lawsuit says, she was demoted and her pay reduced.
Given the impact the demotion had on Ellis’s mental health, court documents say she took four months of disability leave and six months of unpaid leave. Upon coming back, court documents say she was “rusty” in her new duties and still fragile mentally. Ellis sought accommodations the city wasn’t willing to grant, court documents say, and she was fired in March 2017.
After she was fired, the Salt Lake City Civil Service Commission determined she had been wrongfully demoted and recommended reinstating her — a recommendation court documents say wasn’t heeded since her employment had ended.
In 2017, her lawsuit was moved to the United States District Court for the District of Utah, and in 2022 the defendants moved for summary judgment. They argued “undisputed evidence” couldn’t support Ellis’s claims.
When the federal district court denied summary judgment, the defendants appealed to the appellate court.
In Tuesday’s ruling, however, the appellate court judges said many of the defendants’ arguments were outside of their jurisdiction.
They did, however, weigh in on whether the Salt Lake City officials should be able to claim qualified immunity as a defense.
Against the claim that defendants created a hostile work environment, they said the district court was “too cursory” in deciding that the question was better for a jury than a judge to decide — and directed the lower court to further consider.
As far as qualified immunity being raised as a defense against sex discrimination, the circuit judges wrote that the defendants didn’t raise it as an argument to the district court, and the district court thus did not discuss it in its summary judgment denial.
A defendant has to raise the argument for qualified immunity at summary judgment, the appellate decision says, to benefit from it as a defense.
“We thus dismiss the Defendants’ interlocutory appeal on Ellis’s sex discrimination for lack of jurisdiction,” the ruling says.