ST PAUL, Minn — The St. Paul City Council has approved a $77,000 out-of-court settlement with a former mayor's aide who had filed a disability discrimination lawsuit against the city.
Hope Hoffman had asserted that city staff retaliated against her when she asked for accommodations to help her better navigate around tasks that required excessive amounts of walking.
"I was born with spina bifida, which has always caused me to wear leg braces and visibly affects the way that I walk. And in 2018 I went through a medical malpractice situation and I’m now wearing a prosthetic on my right side," Hoffman told KARE Thursday.
"When I walk anywhere it takes about double the amount of time it would for you and it’s physically more exhaustive for me to walk."
The settlement includes $22,700 for lost wages, $22,700 for emotional distress and $30,000 for attorney's fees. The city is also picking up the cost of mediation between the two parties.
Hoffman was hired as a policy associate to Mayor Melvin Carter in June of 2019. She had served on Gov. Mark Dayton's Young Women's Initiative Cabinet and has spent years advocating for equality for persons with disabilities.
Her work and internships have included helping to craft legislation, so she fully expected to be involved in policy work in the mayor's office. She took the job hoping it would help launch a career in public policymaking.
Hoffman said things went well at St. Paul City Hall until the 2019 Oktoberfest celebration, when she had trouble keeping up with Mayor Carter on foot.
"I’m not from St. Paul, and I didn’t realize this was a huge walking event," Hoffman recalled. "And you’d think when this was passed off to me that there would’ve been a heads-up, like, 'This is a lot of walking. Do we need to arrange anything, Hope? Are you good'?"
Hoffman said she asked for two accommodations to help her avoid similar situations where she'd be destined to fail. She wanted advance notice if she'd be assigned to handle events that involved a lot of walking, and she wanted to know ahead of time if those venues had accessible parking.
"It wasn’t responded to and I had a meeting with the manager and was told to [use] Google Earth to see if there was disability parking at the events, which you can’t do anyway. That's not a thing."
When Hoffman decided to make a formal HR complaint about the lack of accommodations, she was asked to go through an evaluation to determine what her level of disability was. Her troubles walking fast were clear to see, and Deputy Mayor Jaime Tincher knew Hoffman because she'd been Gov. Dayton's chief of staff when Hoffman was on the Young Women's Initiative Cabinet.
"If a disability is known and visible and there’s no monetarily burdensome resource issue with accommodation, it needs to be met because that’s what equality is. It’s not pick and choose what you think I should get."
Hoffman said her manager started to assign her more menial tasks.
"I was asked to pick up AV equipment, pick up dishware off the conference table, make really heavy binders, and do intern work, the grunt work, the gopher work. It became this targeted retaliation, trying to test my physical limitations."
She said the two other policy aides were given more substantive tasks related more directly to the policymaking role.
"My manager called me and said I had to staff the front desk because the other two policy aides had more important projects to do, which told me that I wasn’t valued, that my work wasn’t valued," Hoffman explained.
"It was demeaning -- the bias that my disability made me incapable in their eyes."
The last straw for Hoffman came during a meeting the staff member responsible for coordinating Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA compliance.
"In my meeting with the ADA coordinator, when we finished, I dropped my bag or something, and they said to my face, 'Sometimes I feel handicapped by the end of the week too'," Hoffman recalled.
"Trying to compare your exhaustion to someone who lives with physical disabilities is just beyond not okay. The person you'd think is in the know would be the ADA coordinator. That was kind of the end of it for me. I put in my resignation the next day."
City response
Mayor Carter's spokesperson Peter Leggett issued this statement:
"We remain disheartened that our efforts to ensure Ms. Hoffman's success were not enough to make her feel supported during her time with the city, and amid our ongoing work to sustain our diverse and inclusive working environment, remain committed to learning from and preventing this experience from recurring in the future."
After Hoffman raised the issue of her challenges walking quickly, the city gave her a lighter computer notepad to use, rather than the heavier laptop. She was also offered the use of the deputy mayor's reserved parking spot.
Hoffman said there aren't enough dedicated accessible parking slots near City Hall, but people with disability parking placards can park for free in regular metered spots. But she said the having access to the deputy mayor's spot didn't solve her request that she be allowed to staff events that involved less walking, or venues that lacked reserved disability parking.
"It’s disappointing but not surprising because disability is always on the back burner, always left out, and it’s really not understood that disability intersects every identity."