A kerfuffle that entangled the Boston Public Library and former Boston Mayor Marty Walsh has died a quiet death in Suffolk Superior Court.
On Aug. 22, Judge James H. Budreau granted a defense motion for summary judgment on state whistleblower claims brought by former BPL employee Michael Durfee against Walsh and the city of Boston.
The defendants are represented by Brian T. Kelly, Joshua Sharp and Lauren Maynard of Nixon Peabody in Boston.
“Winning on summary judgment is always difficult because it’s a fairly high bar,” says Kelly, a partner in the firm’s government investigations and white-collar defense practice group. “But here, once we completed discovery, it was pretty clear that there was no valid whistleblower complaint, and, instead, the plaintiff had been asked to resign based upon his own misconduct in submitting overtime worksheets for time he did not work. It was a totally appropriate personnel action by Mayor Walsh and the city.”
A childhood friend of Walsh, Durfee began working in the city’s library system in 2004 as a junior custodian. On the recommendation of Walsh, the BPL in January 2018 promoted Durfee to the position of manager of custodians in the central library.
But Durfee’s time at the library came to an abrupt end when, during an internal investigation into overtime, he was forced to resign after admitting that, as a junior custodian, he had overstated on his timesheets the hours that he had worked. In his defense, Durfee claimed that it was...
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