As previously reported on March 8th, a $1,000,000 lawsuit was filed against the City of Forney by a previous Forney Firefighter (https://thestateofforney.com/?p=2952). Another former Forney Firefighter, and ex Deputy Fire Chief, who was terminated after four short months at the end of 2022 has now filed a lawsuit against the City of Forney. Deputy Fire Chief Logan Kerr was hired by the Forney fire Department on August 22nd of 2022 and served as the Deputy Fire Chief until December 13th of 2022 at which point, he was terminated.
The lawsuit claims that shortly after assuming his role as Deputy Fire Chief, the Plaintiff discovered that there were several members of the Fire Department, including President of the Forney Fire Association, Randal Morris, that were trading their scheduled shifts with other non-scheduled firefighters for money, which is illegal. As stated in the lawsuit, trading time occurs when a firefighter who is scheduled for a specific shift, sells his or her scheduled shift to another firefighter who performs the work. The originally scheduled firefighter is still compensated even though he did not do the work for which he/she was scheduled to perform. This essentially results in wages being paid for work that is not being done and constitutes theft of time. The practice of shift selling is subject to tax fraud penalties, as well as state jail time and fines in the state of Texas.
The lawsuit, attached below, describes the sequence of events leading to the plaintiff’s termination, after the discovery, which details an apparent investigation the City of Forney conducted into the Plaintiff. This is a developing story.