Judge to reconsider Bridgeport director Dunn’s pension cut
BRIDGEPORT — A Superior Court judge has agreed to consider whether he made a mistake when he ordered former city personnel director David Dunn’s pension cut in half for helping Armando “A.J” Perez cheat his way into becoming the city’s police chief in 2018.
Judge Charles Reed agreed Thursday to hear arguments from Dunn’s lawyer, Barry Knott, that the judge based his decision to cut Dunn’s pension on erroneous information.
A hearing has been scheduled for Nov. 30.
“Argument is necessary to protect the judicial system from unnecessary appellate litigation,” Knott stated in his request for a hearing. He declined comment.
Dunn, who worked for the city for nearly 30 years before his arrest by the FBI in April 2021 for the cheating scandal, was eligible for a yearly pension from the city of $81,969.84.
Last year Dunn was sentenced in U.S. District Court to four months and Perez was sentenced to a year and a day after each pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and making a false statement to the FBI.
Under a 2008 state law, Attorney General William Tong pursued a lawsuit to take both men’s pensions.
State law requires the attorney general to sue seeking to revoke or reduce pensions of public employees who are convicted of crimes related to their office. Perez’s civil trial is scheduled for February.
In his request to the judge to reconsider his order, Knott states that Reed incorrectly calculated Dunn’s social security and other pension benefits and failed to give Dunn credit for being a “whistleblower.”
“The defendant had an unblemished record of service with the city until 2018, when, as acting personnel director, he conspired inexplicably to rig the procedure that he was responsible for overseeing,” the judge stated in his ruling in October to cut Dunn’s pension. “The defendant’s crime was serious, leading to a felony conviction and was perpetrated from the top echelon of city government.”
During the trial, under questioning by Assistant Attorney General Gregory O’Connell, Dunn admitted supplying Perez with the questions to the examination in advance and adapting the scoring for the process to benefit Perez. But he said he was unaware that Perez had two other officers take the exam for him. And he was evasive on whether he lied to the FBI about telling one of the panelists scoring the chief selection process that Mayor Joe Ganim wanted Perez to be one of the finalists for the job.
Tong countered to Knott’s claim in court papers that the judge “did not mistake any relevant evidence, misapply any pertinent law, or otherwise err.”