PARKERSBURG – The West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals ruled this week that the City of Parkersburg was wrong to reduce firefighters’ pay without notice in a 2017 move municipal officials said corrected a six-year-old error.

The court issued its ruling in the lawsuit, originally filed in 2018, on Wednesday, with a 4-1 majority ordering reversal of an Intermediate Court of Appeals decision siding with the city. Chief Justice Hailey Bunn dissented, saying the matter should have been decided by a jury.

“It’s just very, I guess, frustrating to me that the city has chosen to take this position with regard to its firefighters for … nine years,” said Walt Auvil, the Parkersburg attorney representing the plaintiffs.

Auvil said the matter was originally brought up in a grievance hearing for one of the plaintiffs.

“This could have all been resolved for next to nothing if they had just fixed the issue back then,” he said.

Parkersburg Mayor Tom Joyce said Thursday the city was disappointed with the ruling but would “of course” comply with the court’s direction.

“Budgetary impact from damages will take some time to calculate, given the time frame and protracted nature of the litigation, and with some personnel having already retired,” he said. “Our attorneys are still reviewing the decision and guiding us on what the City needs to do to follow the decision.”

In their ruling issued Wednesday, the majority reversed the Intermediate Court of Appeals’ December 2023 decision in the city’s favor and remanded the case to Wood County Circuit Court for further proceedings to calculate damages.

Auvil said that process has gotten more complex since most, if not all, of the affected firefighters have retired and are receiving pensions based on incorrect rates of pay.

“So now we’ve got to figure that out,” he said.

Auvil said it’s his position that the ruling applies to all affected firefighters, not just the named plaintiffs.

The suit was filed by plaintiffs Wayne White, Michael Wood and Joshua Gandee and the International Association of Firefighters Local 91 in 2018, after city officials the year before concluded some firefighters were being paid incorrectly based on a change in their work schedules.

In 2008, City Council enacted longevity pay granting an additional 30 cents an hour for each year of service to full-time employees working a 40-hour week and 25 cents an hour to those working 48-hour weeks, the schedule for civil service firefighters. In addition, an ordinance was passed granting an additional 42 cents an hour to those with the firefighter EMT certification.

On July 1, 2011, the city changed firefighters to a 54-hour week. That same year, longevity pay was discontinued but employees continued to receive the amounts they’d accrued while it was in effect. A revision to the longevity pay ordinance did cite a rate of 22.22 cents for a 54-hour week, according to court documents.

In 2017, city officials determined the longevity and EMT amounts should have been changed to 22.22 cents and 37 cents per hour based on the schedule change. That equates to annualized amounts of $624 for longevity, the amount the other rates added up to and the amount established in the ordinance for part-time workers; and $1,040 for EMTs, according to the Supreme Court ruling. The city began paying the affected firefighters at those rates in August of that year.

The plaintiffs sued in 2018, claiming the city violated the written terms of their employment and the West Virginia Wage Payment and Collection Act when it reduced their pay without notice. The city contended providing notice was unnecessary since the change was correcting an error, consistent with the intent of the ordinances.

Wood County Circuit Court Judge Robert Waters ruled in the firefighters’ favor in the fall of 2021, saying they earned the longevity increases at a 25-cent rate and the 37-cents-an-hour rate city officials said was correct for the EMT certification on 54-hour shifts was not spelled out in the ordinance establishing that incentive.

The city appealed, and West Virginia’s Intermediate Court of Appeals reversed Waters’ summary judgment order in December 2023, sending the case back to the circuit court for further proceedings on the EMT pay question. The firefighters in turn appealed to the state Supreme Court.

Arguments were held on April 1, Auvil said.

The majority opinion said justices found the city’s argument that notice was not required for the changes “unpersuasive because the Firefighters did not earn additional longevity increment after their schedule changed.

“The City unilaterally modified the longevity increment policy without prior notice, and this modification retroactively impaired previously earned longevity increments,” it said.

As for the EMT pay, “the circuit court correctly concluded that the City’s recalculation of the EMT pay to $0.37 per hour had no foundation in the language of the ordinance. Therefore, the circuit court correctly concluded that the City violated the WPCA when it reduced the rate of EMT pay in August 2017 without prior notice to the Firefighters and despite having paid that rate from 2008 to 2017.”

In her dissent, Bunn disagreed with all three rulings, saying summary judgment is not an option when there are issues of material fact in dispute.

“Although both parties at oral argument before this Court contended that there was no material issue of fact, the plaintiff firefighters still alleged that there was no mistake in pay after the change to the fifty-four hour workweek (between 2011 and 2017) and the (25-cent) rate was always the correct amount, while the City argued that change was a correction that made the pay rate accurate,” Bunn wrote. “This glaring factual discrepancy – and the potential legal impact of the discrepancy – has not been adequately addressed by any court and is more appropriately put to a jury consistent with our standards of summary judgment.”

The state Supreme Court also reversed the Intermediate Court’s ruling that the International Association of Firefighters Local 91 – a fraternal organization that is not an official bargaining unit – did not have standing to sue on behalf of its members.

Evan Bevins can be reached at ebevins@newsandsentinel.com.