After 28 years as a St. Paul assistant city attorney, Lisa Veith left City Hall, and not happily. The strategy of the city attorney’s office, in her words, was “making my work life horrendous so I’d either quit or they’d find some reason to fire me. … They tried to manage me out of my job.”
Veith, who in her final years of city employment battled a skin cancer that metastasized to her brain, stepped down from the city attorney’s office on March 1, 2023, about four years before she’d be eligible for full retirement benefits as a senior assistant city attorney. Across nearly three decades representing the city on some of its most complex cases, she said, she had never lost a case at trial.
In that time, “she was super easy to work with,” said Kathy Lantry, a former city council president and department director, who said she was otherwise unfamiliar with the three-year legal fight Veith waged against the city, much of it unfolding while Veith was still employed with the city attorney’s office and even seeking promotion.
Veith’s allegations against the city, St. Paul City Attorney Lyndsey Olson and former Deputy City Attorney Rachel Tierney form the basis of a 29-page lawsuit filed in October 2021 in Ramsey County District Court. The case was settled for $165,000 late last year, with neither side admitting fault.
Her cancer is an ongoing concern and she is scheduled to have brain surgery next week.
Three allegations
Veith’s suit alleged three violations of the Minnesota Human Rights Act: disability discrimination, a failure to accommodate her condition and reprisal. It followed two “workplace conduct policy” complaints she filed with Human Resources and a complaint with the Minnesota Department of Human Rights.
“By the time I reached my Social Security eligibility at age 62, I was absolutely exhausted by all the treatment I’d been getting,” said Veith, 64, in a recent interview. “I had to retire early and take a lower pension … a heartbreaking ending to what my career life plans had been. I don’t want this to happen to anyone else.”
In court filings and interviews, city officials have said they offered Veith multiple accommodations for her health condition, and moved her from one supervisor to another when her working relationship with the first deteriorated. They also said she was uncooperative with a third-party investigation, which Veith described as a sham effort, given that the city replaced the investigator mid-stream.
The city, in its legal response, maintains “that it engaged in the interactive process with Veith by inquiring as to whether she needed any workplace accommodations and that Veith denied needing any accommodations.”
City Attorney Olson said last month that she would not comment on private personnel matters, other than to note that Veith continued to work for the city throughout years of litigation and retired of her own choosing.
Tierney, who is now an attorney in the private sector, said in a written statement last month that she could not comment in any way “on Ms. Veith’s performance, her health condition, or any accommodation she may have requested or received. All of that information is private data on Ms. Veith. … I was not involved in the litigation other than as a witness, and I was not involved in any way in the investigation (including hiring or terminating any investigator) other than as a witness.”
A $165,000 settlement
On Aug. 6 of last year, District Judge Patrick Diamond denied the city’s request for summary judgment, which otherwise might have helped the city end Veith’s lawsuit without a full trial. After more than three years of legal action, the mayor’s office chose to settle the case last November without admitting fault, a decision finalized by the city council on Dec. 11.
Through the negotiated agreement, Veith was awarded $165,000 to settle all claims, damages and fees, with $66,000 of the total issued directly to her attorneys. Another $11,000 went to mediator Mary Pawlenty. Veith calls the settlement “pathetic” consolation, considering that she spent $75,000 of her own money hiring attorneys, preparing depositions and researching her legal case. She made sure not to sign a non-disclosure form, allowing her to comment at will on her case.
A legal fight against the city launched by a worker still employed by the city is unusual enough, but one involving a high-ranking assistant city attorney suing both the city attorney and deputy city attorney is particularly uncommon.
City officials — including Olson and Tierney — gave sworn testimony in a legal deposition and were later re-deposed at Veith’s expense as new evidence emerged through the court process.
“Delay after delay after delay,” Veith said. “The discovery process took two years, which is ridiculous. The rules of civil procedure require you to respond to a discovery request within 30 days. … If you couldn’t do it within 30 days, you’d call the other attorney and say, ‘Can I please have an extension for two weeks, a month at the most?’ It’s a courtesy between lawyers that you do that. But they just kept delaying.”
Veith said that as her cancer treatments unfolded after her initial diagnosis and six-week leave of absence in the summer of 2018, she relied on her many accumulated sick days rather than step down from her job or work part time, two options that would have reduced or eliminated her income, her health benefits and her pension.
As time wore on, her refusal to simply go away seemed to trigger backlash, she says.
“I got along with everybody fine,” Veith recalled. “I didn’t have any problems until I got sick. The first year, management seemed to be pretty sympathetic.”
After a year, she said, Tierney — who was then the deputy city attorney — urged her to look into reducing her hours, rather than rely on the 1,200 to 1,300 hours of sick time she had saved up across nearly three decades of municipal employment. Veith approached Human Resources about establishing special accommodations, but that largely amounted to urging her to go on leave through the Family and Medical Leave Act, she said.
Veith questioned the validity of expecting an employee to work part time rather than use sick time. “But that’s what they’d say to me, over and over,” she said. “If I worked part time, I would have no health insurance while dealing with terminal cancer. Rachel would (explore) how much it would cost me to get me a COBRA policy (bridge coverage). … If I had done that, COBRA ends after two years.”
A history of complex cases
Veith handled some of the city’s most complex cases, including filling in for Tierney during two maternity leaves and writing appellate briefs assigned to her over other attorneys in the office with less experience in the area.
A decade ago, at least a year or two before she was diagnosed with cancer, Veith became the city’s lead attorney on telecommunications matters at a time when Comcast was renegotiating its cable franchise agreement with the city. That negotiation took 4½ years, and extended to small cell technology, an effort by telecoms like Verizon and CenturyLink to deploy poles in the public right-of-way to boost cellular phone signals to 5G speeds without compensating cities financially.
“That was grueling, to say the least, being pressured to get the best deal for the residents of St. Paul, as much as we could, while at the same time taking pressure from the mayor’s office to cut a deal,” Veith recalled. “It didn’t make me popular.”
Outside legal counsel that might otherwise assist the city on cable matters was unable to help due to a conflict of interest. “I needed assistance. I had been handling it by myself for quite a long time,” she said. “I told them that counsel is no longer there. … They said no. Rachel said, ‘We’ll just keep going the way we are.’ (Verizon and CenturyLink) were demanding — sending letters, threatening to (take action) tomorrow.”
“It was stressful, very much so,” she said.
Veith also became the city’s lead attorney, for a while, on a decade-long effort led by churches, nonprofits and owners of corner properties to challenge their municipal right-of-way street assessments. An attorney named Jack Hoeschler, who had repeatedly sued the city, “pursued those cases with a vengeance. … I was just exhausted.”
“One day I came in and I had, like, 13 lawsuits on my desk,” she recalled. “And in the civil division, we did not have clerical staff trained in civil litigation tools. Sometimes we would have one or two part-time law clerks, and they graduate and you have to get another one. It was just too much.”
Eventually, the cases were taken away from her. “Rachel had asked me for a memo I had done on assessments a year earlier,” Veith recalled. “I said, ‘Just to jog your memory, here’s everything.’ And she just went ballistic. I understood assessments very, very well.”
Performance improvement plans
The assessments lawsuits were transferred instead to civil litigation, a different division in the city attorney’s office, which had no better luck with the cases when they were consolidated and argued before the state Supreme Court.
Veith recalled another supervisor giving her a performance review that measured three, or “satisfactory,” on a four-point scale. Despite the grade, and despite winning an appeals case around that time, she was placed on back-to-back performance improvement plans that each stretched for three or four months, only to be extended months longer.
“I think they extended it three times,” she recalled. “It was excruciating. I had to give them every little detail of every little thing I was working on.”
The city, in its initial legal response to Veith’s civil filing, acknowledged that Tierney provided Veith with a “Clarification of Expectations” memo in March 2019 “discussing various performance issues that Veith was having, and states that the memo speaks for itself.”
She was placed on a performance improvement plan in March 2020 “as a result of her continuous poor performance and her failure to improve despite repeated coaching and feedback,” according to the city’s legal response to her filing. The “PIP” was extended “due to Veith’s continued poor performance and failure to show continued improvement.”
Given her workload, Veith resisted or was unable to find time for vacations, but did so for a couple of weeks around March 2020 when her immunotherapy treatment left her suffering intense side effects.
“When I got back from vacation, (Tierney) sent me an email saying hold off on contacting your clients,” Veith recalled. “My husband said, ‘You’ve got to get a lawyer.’”
A ‘sham’ investigation?
In a December 2020 meeting on Microsoft Teams with some 28 attorneys and office staff, Tierney allegedly flipped back and forth between screens, revealing the top file on her screen to be “Veith PIP July 2020” and another that read “Veith Personnel File,” according to Veith’s civil complaint.
Veith filed a discrimination complaint with the Minnesota Department of Human Rights in July 2021 and then her lawsuit against the city in October 2021. In it, Veith maintained that Laurie Stoffer Steiger, an outside legal investigator hired by the city, was removed from looking into her complaints alleging violations of workplace conduct policy and replaced with another investigator, Michelle Soldo. No explanation was given other than that there had been “conflicts of interest.”
Veith said Steiger had come across a written document called “The Lisa Plan,” which the city initially failed to turn over during the legal evidence process known as discovery. “The lawyer for the city had said she had no idea what she was talking about and would have to go through thousands and thousands of documents to find it,” Veith said.
“They never gave it to my lawyers. My lawyers demanded it. And when we asked for it, the first thing they did was they sent the plan and had completely redacted it,” Veith said. “It was a piece of paper with all black lines.”
A reporter’s efforts in recent weeks to obtain a copy of “The Lisa Plan” through a request to the city, filed under the state Data Practices Act, was unsuccessful. Calls to Steiger were not returned.
Veith declined a sit-down, three-hour interview with Soldo, and her lawyers questioned why the lengthy investigation needed to start from the beginning. The city maintained in its legal response to Veith’s civil complaint that “Soldo was provided a copy of all of … Steiger’s prior investigatory materials,” though Veith felt otherwise based on Soldo’s written questions to her.
Soldo ultimately found no reason to support her complaints and the city deemed the investigation closed.
“In 2023, Ms. Veith notified the city that she wanted to retire and she departed amicably,” said Emily Buss, a spokesperson for the mayor’s office, in a recent email, noting the city is limited in what it may disclose about private personnel matters. “The city wishes Ms. Veith well in her retirement.”
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