A Circuit Court jury yesterday awarded a former city official more than $3 million, upholding her claim that she lost her job in 2003 for blowing the whistle on what she saw as wrongdoing in the administration of former Mayor Jeremy Harris.

Nancy Olipares served as head of the Oahu Workforce Investment Board, a federally funded city agency that provides job training and other employment services, from 2000 to mid-2003.

Her employment contract was not renewed by Michael Amii, the director of the city Department of Community Services, after she clashed with Amii over questions about how the city was spending, and not spending, Oahu Workforce money.

The jury deliberated a half-day before returning a verdict in favor of Olipares, awarding her just more than $1 million in lost wages and retirement benefits and $2 million in general damages for pain and suffering inflicted on her by city officials.

"The biggest thing is that the jury affirmed for me that I hadn't done anything wrong," Olipares said at an afternoon news conference.

She said that after losing her city job, she started a new career as a special education teacher. She plans to return to that job at Lincoln Elementary School, where she teaches nine special needs students.

Her lawyer, David Simons, called the verdict "a call to action" by the jury, to make sure that "courageous, hard-working employees like Nancy don't get their careers ruined for speaking their minds and telling the truth."

POSSIBLE APPEAL

City Deputy Corporation Counsel Marie Gavigan said she was "disappointed" by the verdict and that the city would "weigh its options" regarding a possible appeal of the case.

Simons said he fully expects the city to appeal.

Simons said in the weeks before the trial, he offered to settle the case for $75,000, but Corporation Counsel Carrie Okinaga "never offered more than $5,000."

The lawsuit was based on allegations Olipares was fired for raising concerns about the organization's operations. Olipares claimed the city improperly interfered with the investment board's decisions and that it retaliated against her when she complained.

The investment board is attached to the city's Department of Community Services.

After her contract was not renewed, Amii replaced Olipares with Christine McColgan, who served as Oahu Workforce director, at a much higher salary than Olipares, until police raided the offices of Oahu Workforce and a company where McColgan's son worked in late 2004, seizing records and computers.

During the trial, which ended Thursday, McColgan took the Fifth Amendment and refused to answer questions about an ongoing criminal investigation, which centers on a series of non-bid contracts she awarded while in public office.

Mayor Mufi Hannemann is out of town and had no comment on the jury verdict, spokesman Bill Brennan said yesterday. City Council chairwoman Barbara Marshall could not be reached for comment.

City attorneys tried to portray Olipares during the trial as a disgruntled former employee whose employment contract was not renewed because she lacked communication skills and was the cause of increasing fiction in the Oahu Workforce office.

They said that Amii, who retired from public service in 2006, did not need a reason for his decision not to renew Olipares' annual employment contract. It was purely a discretionary decision, Amii testified and city lawyers emphasized during the trial.

But Simons argued to the jury that the non-renewal could be a form of retaliation against Olipares for blowing the whistle on what she saw as wrongdoing by the city.

In his closing argument to the jury, Simons said that Olipares "was a fine communicator, it was her message that got her in trouble."

CALLED FOR BIDDING

Simons said Olipares' problems with Amii and his deputy, John Sabas, heated up after she told them that she believed millions of dollars in Oahu Workforce-funded work that the city was performing should actually be put out to competitive bid.

And she insisted that federal law creating Oahu Workforce and other agencies like it around the country stated clearly that once the Oahu Workforce board of directors decided how budgeted funds should be spent, the money had to be immediately disbursed.

That didn't sit well with Amii, who felt that city administrators should have final say on the spending.

Barry Sooalo, an attorney who worked at Oahu Workforce under both Olipares and McColgan, testified in the trial that Amii instructed him to search around the country for another government agency that had the same interpretation of federal law as Amii did.

Sooalo said he couldn't find any.

After Olipares left Oahu Workforce, Amii hired McColgan as her replacement. He tried to give McColgan a salary of $93,000 a year — $20,000 more than Olipares was paid, but the city personnel department later reduced the salary to $83,000.

Sooalo testified that Amii told him to establish a special $30,000 fund to be used to pay McColgan for "overtime." Olipares did not claim overtime when she held the job, although she frequently worked long hours, according to Sooalo and other witnesses.

SON GIVEN CONTRACTS

Sooalo also testified that after McColgan took over at Oahu Workforce, the agency awarded five $25,000 non-bid contracts to a company where McColgan's son worked. Sooalo said he thought the contract awards were "a conflict" for McColgan but was told to approve them anyway.

When McColgan took the witness stand in the Olipares trial, she gave her name and then Simons asked her if she had ever misused public money for the benefit of herself or a family member.

"On the advice of my attorney, I'm invoking my rights under the Fifth Amendment and I won't answer any questions," McColgan said.

She was then excused from the stand and jurors were given no explanation for McColgan's brief appearance.

That's because, in paperwork filed earlier this month, city lawyers said a criminal investigation of McColgan is still ongoing but they asked presiding judge Bert Ayabe to keep that information from the jury in the Olipares trial, arguing that it would be prejudicial to the defense.

Ayabe upheld the request.

When Amii testified, he acknowledged that he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor criminal charge of theft of city services in July 2003, a case that had nothing to do with Olipares or Oahu Workforce.

He told the Olipares jury that he had made his secretary work "for political purposes" on city time.

"I asked her do something improper," he said, adding that he "served six months probation and paid my restitution."

Under questioning from Simons, Amii said the conviction had no effect on his political career. He served out the remainder of his term as a department head in then-Mayor Harris' cabinet, then retired and began collecting full pension benefits from 30 years of work in state and city government.

Before Olipares left city employment, Amii signed paperwork in her personnel file that made her ineligible for employment as a civil servant with the city.

"They saw to it that she was labeled ineligible for rehire," Simons told the jury. "They just wiped her career out for no good reason."

Reach Jim Dooley at jdooley@honoluluadvertiser.com.