Highway patrol to fight lawsuits

Tuesday, April 18, 2000 | 10:47 a.m.

CARSON CITY -- The Nevada Highway Patrol will use "all of our resources" to battle sexual discrimination lawsuits brought by six Clark County female workers who claim they were mistreated, the head of the patrol said today.

Col. Mike Hood, superintendent of the patrol, said the women never raised any objections or filed any grievances with their superiors about the alleged incidents of discrimination.

The six women -- five of them troopers -- filed the suit Monday in federal court in Reno.

About 26 percent of the 620-member patrol force are women, Hood said.

"This is so amazing to me," Hood said. "This is the first time this has been brought to anybody's attention."

But Kenneth McKenna, the Reno lawyer who filed the lawsuits, disputed Hood's statement.

"Before anybody can file a sexual harassment lawsuit in federal court, they first have to make a complaint with the (federal) Equal Rights Commission, which is served on the highway patrol. And they have an opportunity to respond," he said.

"That takes several months. They (the women) have to prove with evidence a pattern of making complaints in writing and verbally getting no response from the highway patrol.

"We have, in some cases, four years of complaint-making and the highway patrol doing nothing except retaliating against the person making the complaint," McKenna said.

One woman, Angela Newman, a program assistant in the patrol, alleged she was the target of harassment, jokes and sexual remarks by a man who worked in another division. She said she reported the problem but nothing was done.

Hood said the agency barred that man from Newman's office as soon as it became aware of the incidents.

Others filing the suit were Troopers Christina Zaporowski, Tammy Tedesko, Ann English, Gina Johnson and Judy Dart.

Zaporowski alleges that each time she was pregnant in 1996, 1997 and 1998, she was removed from patrol duties and assigned an office job. She said she was cautioned by a superior in 1998 not to say anything about the transfer.

Her suit calls it a violation of the Federal Pregnancy and Discrimination Act. During her last pregnancy she worked as a dispatcher, which she called an "extremely stressful position."

Hood said it was Zaporowski's choice to leave the regular patrol duties.

"Our policy is to allow them to stay on the road," he said.

The patrol's policy was changed in late 1996 or early 1997 to comply with the federal law, Hood said. The decision is up to the woman and her doctor, Hood said, adding that Zaporowski made a written request to work as a dispatcher.

"We wanted to keep her employed and she had run out of sick leave. We allowed her to work anywhere she wanted. She chose dispatch," Hood said.

Tedesko's suit said she was forced to go into the men's locker room since 1991 to get her uniform. Hood said there are separate locker rooms for men and women in Clark County.

McKenna is the lawyer who won a $425,000 judgment for Trooper Mary Howard in a sexual discrimination suit against the agency.

"You've got some dinosaur mentality at the core of this problem," McKenna said. "They have to change or be changed."

There was no value placed on the six lawsuits, but McKenna said if the Howard judgment is any indication, "You're talking serious money."

There is a "bad attitude" held by some upper management people about women in the patrol and this "permeates down to a couple of jerks (males)," McKenna said.

"They should fix the problem. How many times do we have to hit them over the head with a 2-by-4?"

Cy Ryan covers state government for the Sun. He can be reached at (775) 687-5032.