LAKE STEVENS — The lawsuit filed in 2015 by former Lake Stevens police Cmdr. Dennis Taylor against the city and its previous administration has been settled for $400,000.
The agreement among Taylor, the city, former city administrator Jan Berg and former Mayor Vern Little was reached with assistance from a third-party mediator. The document recently was obtained by The Daily Herald under state public records laws.
The settlement appears to mark the closing chapter of years of discord between City Hall and the police department, both of which have since changed leadership.
The parties involved in the lawsuit denied any wrongdoing. That was part of the agreement. They also declined to comment for this story.
The settlement required Mayor John Spencer to write two letters, one rescinding a dishonesty finding against Taylor and the other summarizing Taylor’s accomplishments in Lake Stevens. Spencer took office after Taylor and Berg left the city.
“Upon current review of the collective documents and related information (and talking to Taylor), I have found that any finding of dishonesty is inconclusive,” Spencer wrote.
Taylor retired to pursue other interests, the mayor wrote.
Taylor had a long career with the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office and also had served as Granite Falls police chief. He worked for Lake Stevens from 2013 to 2015. He served as the second in command at the police department. He had been brought on, in part, to rein in a department that had been making headlines for unrest and bad behavior.
In 2015, he became the subject of an internal investigation after a complaint from another police officer. The officer who made the complaint has since left the city.
The officer had been accused of using a slang term for a sex act to describe a problem at the department. The conflict revolved around Taylor’s statements about the allegations. The city hired an outside investigator.
The investigator’s report found that Taylor had been dishonest, a claim Taylor called “false and defamatory” in court papers.
In the termination letter, Little accused Taylor of dishonesty. Taylor was placed on paid leave through 2015, provided he retire by the end of that year, something he had expressed interest in months earlier.
Taylor filed a lawsuit against the city that October. He alleged that he was being wrongfully fired. He accused city leaders of trying to ruin his reputation as retaliation for how he managed other employees. Little and Berg were listed as defendants.
Berg resigned in November 2015. She received $100,000 in severance pay. Little’s mayoral term was up at the end of 2015, and he did not seek re-election. Berg was hired as assistant finance director for the city of Marysville in November 2016, after a short stint with the city of Stanwood.
While the lawsuit languished, Taylor’s certification to work as a police officer in Washington lapsed at the end of 2018, because he hadn’t been on duty in two years, according to the Washington State Criminal Justice Training Commission. The settlement followed three weeks later.
It says that none of the parties will contact the press about the resolution. However, pay-outs must go through the City Council. In this case, the meeting agenda did not say what the settlement was regarding. Around the same time, the court case was dismissed, with the judge citing an agreement among the parties.
This isn’t the first lawsuit the city has settled in recent years with former police officers. A year before Taylor filed his court case, the city paid former police Sgt. Julie Jamison $325,000 to settle a suit in which she alleged sexual harassment and retaliation. The officer she named was the same man who had the dispute with Taylor.
Taylor and his lawyer claimed Berg was retaliating against Taylor for his support of Jamison.
The Lake Stevens City Council authorized the settlement agreement in a Jan. 22 vote. It took the city three weeks to provide the newspaper four pages of related documents.
Kari Bray: 425-339-3439; kbray@heraldnet.com.
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