Terrebonne settles case with HPD sergeant for $300,000

Terrebonne Parish settled a lawsuit brought by a Houma Police sergeant last Tuesday for $300,000 after a jury found he was punished for speaking out against how the city’s police chief is chosen.

Jurors awarded Sgt. Kyle Faulk $250,000 in damages following a December retrial of a case where he alleged that he lost his position after verbally challenging the chief’s selection. Instead, he was assigned to a uniformed car patrol slot on the night shift.

“I’m satisfied and I’m happy for Kyle, so he can put this behind him,” said attorney Jerri Smitko, who represented Faulk in the case.

The retrial of the case came after an appeals judge had reduced the $250,000 judgment to $45,000.

The chief’s spot had been a civil service position, requiring it first be advertised and then chosen from a qualified pool of applicants, all of whom must have passed the Municipal Fire and Police Civil Service Police Chief’s Test administered by the State Examiner’s Office.

Parish President Michel Claudet currently selects the police chief.

Faulk balked publicly at the change and, he said, punishment followed.

Initially, Faulk was awarded $350,000 after a 2013 trial. An appeals court lowered the award. A new suit was brought and Faulk prevailed, winning the $250,000.

Claudet indicated last month that Terrebonne would file another appeal in the case. During the May 27 parish council meeting, he said parish legal fees in the Faulk case totaled nearly $90,000.

Smitko told The Times in previous interviews that if they were to continue to fight the case, more attorney fees would accrue.

“There comes a point in litigation where it is time for officials to get certain matters resolved,” Claudet said of the settlement. “Evidently, we had reached that point.”

Faulk accepted a lump sum of $300,000, which does not require the parish pay his legal fees.

Faulk originally sued the Houma Police Department and Terrebonne Parish Consolidated Government in 2012 after he was removed from his daytime position as a recruiter and public information officer and placed on uniformed car patrol during the night shift.

Faulk was reassigned two days after his attorney sent an email throughout Terrebonne Parish asserting a House bill proposed by Rep. Gordon Dove, R-Houma, in the 2012 Legislative Session was unconstitutional.

The measure, now signed into law, only affects the HPD. It extended another law exempting the police chief’s position from civil service classification. That allows the parish president to hire or fire the police chief at will.

If the position were classified under civil service, then the parish president would have to hire the police chief from a qualified pool of applicants who first passed the civil service police chief’s test.

Smitko’s 2012 letter said two HPD captains were more qualified and had more seniority than Duplantis for the chief’s position and that the proposed law “disadvantaged” the pair, according to court documents.

Dove told The Times previously that the law sunsets six months into the next parish president’s term.

The original law was set to expire in 2012. The extension ends on July 1, 2016. Claudet’s parish presidential term ends Jan. 7, 2016, at noon.

Dove said he proposed the bill at Claudet’s request.

“That was my request in order to make the chief of police the same as all my department heads,” Claudet said in earlier interviews with The Times. “All my department heads are able to be removed at any time by me and they’re at-will employees. They don’t have normal protections of the parish employees and they certainly don’t even come close to having the protection of civil service employees.”