Minneapolis assistant city attorney’s bias gripe, aired by MnIndy, lands in court

Minneapolis Assistant City Attorney Julie Delgado-O’Neil’s discrimination complaint against the city — which the Minnesota Independent aired last summer after the city’s Department of Civil Rights ruled in her favor — is now in court, the Star Tribune reports.

Anna Pratt’s Aug. 1 story for MnIndy detailed Delgado-O’Neil’s charge that the Minneapolis City Attorney’s office — in concert with the city’s Human Resources Department — uses an oral exam to promote white attorneys while leaving attorneys belonging to racial and ethnic minorities behind. Pratt cited one question from the exam, complete with a typo (“How do you evaluate the breadth of your knowledge about you [sic] field?”), that Delgado-O’Neil cited as providing an opening for favored staffers to cite job experiences offered only to them.

Pratt also noted that in September 2007 the first of two Civil Rights Department findings of probable cause in the case came within two weeks of Mayor R.T. Rybak’s announcement that he would not reappoint then-City Attorney Jay Heffern at year’s end. The Strib’s assertion that the city has used the oral exam for more than four decades, apparently learned from Heffern’s replacement, Susan Segal, doesn’t jibe with Pratt’s reporting, which credited Heffern with having instituted the exam.