Last Wednesday, Jan. 27, the Bill Moriarty case landed at the 3rd Court of Appeals. In 2005, Moriarty was dismissed as program director of the Austin Clean Water Program by general contractor Earth Tech, after the city discovered that he and Diane Hyatt, of the tech firm Hyatt and Associates, had become a couple sometime during Moriarty’s tenure and that Hyatt’s firm had been assigned ACWP contracts – although Moriarty did not handle contract assignments.
The city auditor and other investigators found no wrongdoing, but City Manager Toby Futrell said the perceived conflict of interest and a failure to disclose it required Moriarty’s dismissal, and she prevailed upon Earth Tech to drop the hammer. Moriarty and Hyatt claimed that in fact rival contractors and their lobbyists had conspired to pressure Futrell to oust him, and in 2006 they sued city officials and several contracting firms and their representative. The officials settled later that year; District Judge Margaret Cooper granted a summary judgment in favor of the remaining defendants, primarily for insufficient evidence that their influence at City Hall led to the dismissal.
The issue under appeal last week was whether those defendants – various engineering firms, among them CH2M Hill, Malcolm Pirnie, and PBS&J, as well as former mayor and now lobbyist Bruce Todd – must instead stand trial for “tortious interference” with Moriarty’s Earth Tech contract, for having pressured Futrell and former Assistant City Manager Joe Canales to find some reason to remove Moriarty. Moriarty’s attorney Robert Notzon argued that a jury needs to determine whether Futrell and Canales were telling the truth when they testified in depositions that the contractors’ influence was not the reason for removing Moriarty; the defendants’ attorneys countered that there is insufficient evidence to sustain that claim and that, in any case, Futrell didn’t need a reason to ask for a new program director. The appeals court is expected to make its ruling later this year.
This article appears in February 5 • 2010.
