Fighting arbitration
Ex-police officer seeks pay after he resigned following indictment
Troy’s mayor, police union at odds over pay package for former cop.
The city is suing its largest police union for the second time this year to block a case from going before an arbitrator.
Both cases filed in Rensselaer County State Supreme Court involve Police Benevolent Association grievances seeking back pay that the union says the city owes to a controversial officer who resigned and to three sergeants after the city declined to promote one of them to captain.
“The city is attempting to union-bust us — plain and simple,” said Officer Nick Laviano, the PBA president, in reference to the filing of the city’s second lawsuit.
“Better people have tried in the past and were unsuccessful,” Laviano said Thursday. “We wish the mayor luck.”
In response to questions about the lawsuits and the city’s strategy for avoiding arbitration, Mayor Patrick Madden’s spokesman John Salka declined to comment, citing the pending litigation.
The city’s latest lawsuit, filed in late March, seeks to avoid arbitration on whether former Officer Dominick Comitale should be paid for accrued vacation time, compensatory time and personal time he was due when he resigned from the police department on Jan. 2. It’s unclear how much Comitale is seeking.
The officer resigned in advance of a hearing in which the city was seeking to fire him as a result of a Sept. 8 incident when he allegedly elbowed Twin Town Little League vice president Darren Ayotte and pressed his police badge into Ayotte’s forehead after pushing him against a car. Prior to that off-duty incident, the city had paid more than $174,000 since 2011 to resolve four allegations of excessive force filed against Comitale.
When he resigned, Comitale was under indictment for misdemeanor assault and harassment charges. The indictment, brought by former District Attorney Joel E. Abelove in December, was dismissed for failing to meet the state’s 90-day speedy trial deadline.
“We are not seeking to get Dominick’s job back,” Laviano said. “He is not seeking to get his job back.”
Laviano said the city offered Comitale $5,000 “to go away. If they didn’t think Dominick was entitled to his payout, why would they offer him anything at all?”
The earlier lawsuit, filed in January, seeks to block the PBA’S demand that the city either promote one of three sergeants: Randall French, Stephen Seney or Salvatore Carello. As an alternative, the union asked the city to pay each of the candidates a captain’s salary of $93,188, compared to $77,288 for a sergeant.
The city didn’t promote any of the three until it could get a new civil service list to fill its vacant captain’s post. French and Seney are among the top three, with Sgt. Steven M. Barker displacing Carello. The department has started its interview process. French is again the top-ranked candidate, but has been passed over since his fatal shooting of DWI suspect Edson Thevenin in April 2016.
That incident is the subject of a pending federal civil rights lawsuit.