In its recent ruling in Killgore v. SpecPro Professional Services LLC, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit addressed disclosures protected by California’s whistleblower law.
Factual background
Aaron Killgore was a program manager for SpecPro. SpecPro assists government agencies in preparing reports required by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Killgore worked on SpecPro’s contract with the U.S. Army Reserve Command to prepare an environmental assessment of a proposed modification of helicopter landing sites near Conroe, Texas. William Emerson was Killgore’s supervisor. The Army Reserve’s project chief was Laura Caballero.
During SpecPro’s investigation, Killgore learned the Army Reserve had been using the Conroe site for helicopter attack training for more than a decade, but found no lease, authorization, or records of any environmental damage related to the prior operations.
Caballero instructed Killgore’s team to exclude references to the prior helicopter operations in its report. She considered the prior activity irrelevant because the proposed operation involved helicopter landing, not low-level helicopter hovering missions above the ground as the prior operations had.
Killgore told Caballero and Emerson that he believed excluding the prior operations from the report would violate NEPA’s transparency requirements. Caballero had complained to Emerson about Killgore’s pushback. When Killgore’s team’s draft report included oblique references to the...
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