ITEM FILE PHOTO
Saugus Town Hall.
BY BRIDGET TURCOTTE
SAUGUS — Town officials insist the personal information of 1,200 employees is safe after the data was released in a public records’ request.
In a memo to town employees, John Vasapolli, town counsel, said the personal data was provided to Elayne Alanis, an attorney representing James Rivers, the former Information Technology director who has filed suit against Saugus for wrongful termination.
“Discovery materials such as these are not public, and not part of the public record, in any way,” Vasapolli wrote in the letter. “The former employee’s attorney is not entitled to use or disclose any personally identifying information, or make it public.”
Alanis is the only person who was provided with the materials, Vasapolli said. The information was gathered by town departments and given to the outside lawyers, who then sent it to Alanis, he said.
“A former employee who is suing the town made voluminous requests for records that the town was obligated to produce in that litigation,” the letter said. “In response, the town’s outside counsel provided those documents to that former employee’s counsel. Due to the breadth of the items sought, this was a large production, provided on a CD-ROM.”
Alanis received 49,000 pages of information and nearly all of it was “completely irrelevant,” she said. Within the documents are pages containing names, Social Security numbers and banking and direct deposit data, she said. Also included in the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) package was 140 pages of the Gospel of Matthew, Alanis said.
It was no accident that she was given an overload of information purposefully, according to Alanis.
“I’m told by my colleagues it’s an old tactic,” she said. “Lawyers used to get boxes and boxes of documents with the smoking gun document buried somewhere.”
But Vasapolli insists that is not the case.
“It was a very broad request,” he said. “That’s why they had produced so many documents. The attorneys that are representing the town are very capable attorneys. They know what they’re doing.”
Alanis said she contacted Arrowood Peters, the Boston-based law firm that is representing the town, to let them know what she had received, because the employees should be notified. In response, the town insisted that any documents containing personal information must be removed before being shared with the court, he said.
In the letter to employees, Vasapolli said Alanis did not respond to the request “but instead went to the press in an apparent effort to extract some kind of leverage in the lawsuit being brought against the town.”
Town Manager Scott Crabtree said Vasapolli is responsible for overseeing the matter and has been working with outside special counsel on the litigation.
“As you are aware, in 2015, the court dismissed me as a defendant in that lawsuit,” Crabtree said. “The town takes all matters involving employee’s personal information seriously. The town is committed to safeguarding such sensitive information.”
Bridget Turcotte can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter @BridgetTurcotte.
