Cordova Parks Employee Files Lawsuit After She Says She Was Fired For Doing Her Job
RANCHO CORDOVA (CBS13) — Claims of racist and sexually offensive comments are at the center of a civil lawsuit against a local park district by a former top employee.
Kathy Reyes Spindola claims the superintendent of the Cordova Recreation and Park District made a series of inappropriate and offensive comments during staff meetings. After reporting them, the suit claims she was fired.
Spindola had been with the department for eight years and was a supervisor who was required to report any complaints up the chain of command. But a 14-page complaint says doing her job cost her her job.
"I really feel like it was form of retaliation," she said. "I was told my personality was too strong. I needed to soften my edges. And I really don't feel like they would have said that to a male."
Spindola reported a series of what she calls racially, sexually and religiously offensive remarks by her boss, Superintendent Gerry Dobbs, after other employees came to her with similar complaints.
"I told him to go to human resources and report it and he said he didn't feel comfortable doing that because I would like to be promoted and I feel if I do something like that, it could stop that from happening," Reyes said.
The document claims Dobbs referred to working with "dark-skinned people" as "ragheads," told Spindola he once asked an employee, "Do I look like a migrant worker to you."
It also accuses him of telling co-workers about a former female colleague who tried to work her way to the top by "giving him a coffee mug bearing a provocative picture of herself scantily clothed on a bearskin rug."
Her attorney Mary-Alice Coleman says her client was simply doing what any responsible supervisor would have done.
"The community should be very upset," she said. "She works for a public entity. A public entity in my book has even more obligation to comply with the law and to use taxpayer funds appropriately and correctly and she was trying to protect her employer."
Officials with the Cordova Recreation and Parks District would not talk to CBS13 on camera, saying they can't comment on personnel issues.
Dobbs did not respond to CBS13's requests for comment on this story.