5 years and $350K later, city forced to rehire whistleblower

Nearly five years after Assistant City Attorney John McGovern was fired from Orange’s law department, he is back to work.

The rehiring of McGovern — a whistleblower who has spent the better part of the last several years in court over his wrongful firing — was a victory, appellate court judges ruled this year, not only over his termination, but also over a “tortured” court process, elongated and confused by the city’s inept and missing responses to court orders in the case.

“They were a disaster,” McGovern’s attorney, Ron Ricci, said in a phone interview of Orange’s response to McGovern’s lawsuit. In Ricci’s 21 years as an attorney, he said he’d “never seen anything like it.”

Questions about a medical leave

McGovern worked a part-time position in the city’s legal department, handling mostly worker’s compensation issues. In a November interview with NJ Advance Media, McGovern said he enjoyed the job for years, until early 2013, when he was asked to deal with the medical leave of a city clerk.

Read more: http://www.nj.com/essex/index.ssf/2017/12/5_years_and_350k_later_city_forced_to_rehire_whist.html