Judge ups award for fired employee

Former college director to get at least $676K in whistleblower case

SANTA FE — A jury’s decision in May to award a former Northern New Mexico College employee nearly $420,000 in a lawsuit filed under the Whistleblower Protection Act could exceed more than $1 million when all is said and done.

Earlier this month, Santa Fe District Court Judge Francis J. Mathew doubled the $239,451 portion of the award that the jury allocated to cover Melissa Velasquez’s loss of wages after she was fired in 2014.

With interest, the total judgment against Northern in the Velasquez case — only the latest in a series of costly lawsuits brought by former employees of the Española-based college — is now $676,402, says Mathew’s written order.

The award total also includes $180,000 that the jury provided for emotional distress suffered by Velasquez, former director of Northern’s El Rito campus, who says she was dismissed after reporting waste, fraud and abuse of federal grant money.

But the cost for the four-year school will go still higher in the case. Mathew said Velasquez can also recover “litigation costs and reasonable attorney’s fees in an amount to be determined” by the judge.

Two days after the judge increased the award, Velasquez’s attorney Christopher Moody filed a series of motions that could add another $434,000 owed by the college, including $200,245 in attorney’s fees.

Velasquez had worked at the college for two years before she was appointed El Rito campus director in November 2011 under former NNMC president Nancy “Rusty” Barceló. Velasquez’s lawsuit claimed she was demoted to the position of coordinator of continuing education at the school’s main campus in Española after she reported financial abuses.

She also said she reported to at least three top-ranking administrators her suspicions that two college employees not under her supervision were getting drunk on the job, but nothing was done about it. The college later blamed her for a “failure to address this problem as a pretext to eliminate her from a supervisory role,” her lawsuit alleged.

The college can still appeal the jury’s original ruling in Velasquez’s favor.

Mark Komer, the attorney representing the college, said Thursday that a decision on whether to appeal won’t be made until after Judge Mathew rules on the latest set of motions. He declined to comment on the decision by the jury or the judge.

In one new motion, Velasquez is asking to be reinstated at the college and also asks the court to make NNMC pay more if it doesn’t take her back.

Moody did not return a phone call from the Journal on Thursday.

According to the court filings, NNMC is opposing all the motions, except the one seeking attorney’s fees.