A former Little Rock police officer fired for excessive overtime settled her lawsuits against the city, winning almost $400,000 in exchange for dropping complaints against the former police chief.
The city settled its issues with Natasha Sims on Monday afternoon after a daylong, court-ordered mediation.
Former Police Chief Stuart Thomas fired Sims in August 2013 after an internal investigation found that she had misrepresented and exaggerated the hours she worked to claim overtime pay that she wasn't entitled to receive. Thomas retired in June 2014.
Sims had said accusations of her fabricating work hours could be shown to be false using the time and dates on traffic tickets she had written. She also pointed to flaws in a city GPS tracking software investigators used to determine her location, saying it reported her vehicle in places it couldn't possibly be, such as in the Arkansas River.
Pulaski County Circuit Judge Tim Fox held a two-day trial in the case in November, and a mediation had taken place before then, but a city lawyer with no decision-making authority attended that session.
Sims' attorneys complained that Little Rock was refusing to attempt mediation, so Fox ordered a second mediation take place that City Manager Bruce Moore and Mayor Mark Stodola would personally attend.
The settlement resulted from that mediation session, which the city manager and mayor attended Monday.
Sims will be paid $387,500, and the city reinstated her to her position, though she immediately retired. The settlement states that the city will make all appropriate contributions to Sims' retirement account.
In exchange, Sims dropped a separate lawsuit, filed against Thomas and the city's Civil Service Commission, in which she claimed that she was fired in retaliation for complaints she'd made to the city's Human Resources Department accusing Thomas of sex discrimination and harassment.
At trial, Sims' attorneys estimated that she was due $170,000 to $401,000 in back pay.
"They started out [asking for] three quarters of a million dollars. It was incrementally [reduced] back-and-forth, and the Municipal League was a participant in this [settlement]," Stodola said.
The settlement will be partially paid through Little Rock's legal insurance with the Arkansas Municipal League, with the rest coming out of the city's general fund.
It will be made in three separate payments, one to Sims' attorneys -- Luther Sutter and Lucien Gillham -- for fees and litigation costs, one to Sims for wages that would have been earned in 2016, and one to Sims representing compensatory damages for 2017.
Sims had been on the force 17 years before being fired. Her annual $60,000 pay had reached about $126,000 with overtime.
She told the judge that she had never cheated the city out of even an hour's pay and never made adjustments to her work schedule without the knowledge and permission of her supervisor.
A review of her overtime by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette showed Sims was paid for 984 hours of overtime in 2010, 1,959 overtime hours in 2011 and 1,500 overtime hours in 2012.
Meanwhile, an internal investigation documented 19 occasions over eight months between August 2011 and April 2012 in which Sims violated the city's overtime policy.
On some of those occasions, the investigation showed, she was at home during the hours she was supposed to be working, but Sims said she sometimes worked from home to complete paperwork. Other times cited by the investigation, she said, she wasn't at home, and she presented tickets she had written as proof she was working.
When Thomas testified, he said the tickets Sims produced were not proof, because the information on a ticket is only as reliable as the officer who wrote it.
Sims said she also had been participating in a practice, done by every police officer, known as "cuffing" or "cuff time," which is when an officer is allowed to take off from work early and still receive pay for a full shift with the knowledge and permission of supervisors.
The practice was tolerated by administration as a way to keep overtime costs down by allowing officers to get "cuff time" to repay them for other times, when they would work extra hours without claiming overtime.
Sims said she could not disprove every allegation against her because the paperwork she submitted to her supervisors is gone -- either lost or destroyed as part of the "cuffing" practice.
Thomas testified to knowing about the practice and even participating in it when he was a patrolman, though he said he discouraged it as police chief.
Stodola said Tuesday that the practice started out as a way to help employees and the department, but had gotten extensive.
"There was some question about whether or not this was being done with some knowledge of supervisors [in this instance], which is what led to the settlement," Stodola said.
He said the Police Department no longer allows "cuffing."
Moore had no comment on the settlement Tuesday.
Sutter and Gillham were both out of the office and didn't return emails seeking comment.
Information for this article was contributed by John Lynch of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Metro on 12/21/2016