Idaho settles lawsuit by ex-transportation chief Lowe

BOISE – The state of Idaho has settled a lawsuit filed by former Transportation Director Pam Lowe, who charged she was illegally fired for standing up to political pressure and was discriminated against because she was a woman.

Lowe was the Idaho Transportation Department’s first female director; after she was fired, she was replaced by a man at a salary $22,000 a year higher than what she was paid.

No information was immediately available on the terms of the settlement. Lowe had sought reinstatement in her job, back pay and benefits, and attorney fees and costs as well as damages for emotional distress. The back pay, benefits and attorney fees alone would have added up to about a half-million dollars.

“All I can tell you is this has been resolved, and I’m pleased with the resolution. … I can’t talk about what’s in it. I just can tell you that I’m very pleased to have it resolved,” Lowe said.

The state has paid more than half a million dollars in legal fees to the private law firm hired to defend the state against Lowe’s lawsuit, according the records obtained under Idaho’s open records law.

“All we can do is acknowledge that it has indeed been settled,” said ITD spokesman Mel Coulter.

Lowe, a professional engineer, was a longtime ITD employee, starting there in 1993 and rising to director in January 2007. She was named the department’s first female district engineer in 2000.

She was fired in 2009 after she clashed with staffers for Gov. Butch Otter and with some lawmakers over her efforts to cut back a multimillion-dollar contract with two politically well-connected Idaho firms. The contracts called for the companies to oversee major bonded highway construction projects across the state. Lowe was trying to trim the $50 million Connecting Idaho Partners contract to less than $30 million; it has since ballooned to more than $83 million.

The lead firm, URS, formerly Washington Group, was a big donor to Otter’s election campaigns and to that of then-Senate Transportation Chairman John McGee, R-Caldwell. Lowe said the governor’s chief of staff pressured her to not reduce the contract, and when she resisted, McGee introduced legislation to strip the Idaho Transportation Board of the ability to hire and fire the director. The bill didn’t pass, but the ITD board was concerned; four months later, it fired Lowe.

“I had more than one board member tell me that it was McGee and it was blackmail,” Lowe told The Spokesman-Review in April. “They had no reason other than pure politics to terminate me.”

On March 31, she won a key ruling in the case, when U.S. Magistrate Judge Ron Bush ruled that Lowe wasn’t an “at-will” employee who could be dismissed without cause, as the state had argued. Instead, the court held that state law allows Idaho to terminate a transportation director only for four reasons: “Inefficiency, neglect of duty, malfeasance or nonfeasance in office.”

Lowe contended in her lawsuit that her firing came because she tried to scale back the Connecting Idaho Partners contract; that she was fired without cause and without being allowed a hearing; and that she was discriminated against because she’s female.

She claimed victory after the March 31 ruling, which ITD said it might appeal. Lowe said then, “It absolutely vindicated me and what I had been saying, and that is that the board was happy with my work, I had done a good job, I had had nothing but positive comments from the board as well as certainly my formal evaluations, but that the board succumbed to political blackmail and pressure from John McGee when he ran that bill.”

Lowe started work in March as financial director for the state Department of Transportation in Delaware after two and a half years of unemployment.