The Superior Court has awarded former employees of the Rota municipal council a total of $449,356.66, in connection with their lawsuit against the council and its members.<\/p>\n
Eight employees sued the council and members Richard and Jeffrey Manglona and Balbina Taisacan in 2004 after being terminated from their jobs.<\/p>\n
Associate Judge Juan T. Lizama awarded a total of $376,447.80 in damages to the employees on their claim for violation of civil rights.<\/p>\n
Yesterday, the judge also granted the employees\u2019 request for an award of cost and attorney\u2019s fees of $72,908.86. Of that amount, $59,280.25 pertains to attorney\u2019s fees for 316.95 hours of attorney work rendered.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe court has reviewed the billings and has concluded that [the workers\u2019] attorneys did an adequate job of reducing their request to \u2018hard\u2019 hours, that the hours sought are adequately documented, and that the total amount sought is reasonable given the nature of the proceedings,\u201d Lizama said.<\/p>\n
Lawyers Eric Bozman and Joseph Horey of the O\u2019Connor, Berman, Dotts and Banes law firm represented the employees.<\/p>\n
The employees include Sylvan Atalig, Francisca Barcinas, Robert Calvo, Esperansa Cruz, Maria Manglona, Martin Quitugua, Francisco Taga and Ray Taitague.<\/p>\n
One of the employees, Calvo, died on April 16, 2005. But Lizama yesterday allowed the administrator of his estate, Ronnie M. Calvo, to substitute on the deceased claimant\u2019s behalf.<\/p>\n
The court awarded Calvo a total of $110,238.28 out of the total damages it granted the employees. Yesterday\u2019s court order did not specify which among the other employees successfully prevailed in the lawsuit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Superior Court has awarded former employees of the Rota municipal council a total of $449,356.66, in connection with their lawsuit against the council and its members.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-95131","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95131","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=95131"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95131\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=95131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=95131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=95131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}