Now formerly-ousted Hashish Management Fee Chair Shannon O’Brien’s efforts to return to her job shall be stalled additional, after the state treasurer appealed a choose’s willpower that the pot boss was improperly eliminated and must be reinstated.
State Treasurer Deb Goldberg eliminated O’Brien from the place to which she’d beforehand appointed her in September of 2023 and formally fired her a yr later.
Then on Tuesday, Massachusetts Superior Court docket Affiliate Justice Robert Gordon dominated that Goldberg had performed so improperly, after she did not reveal O’Brien acted with “gross misconduct” such that she must be stripped of her $181,722 annual wage and despatched packing.
Gordon additional declared that O’Brien ought to resume her duties “effective immediately.”
Nevertheless, after describing the choose’s resolution as “wrong,” Goldberg’s workplace filed an enchantment and requested for a keep of his order.
“The public will be irreparably harmed by restoring O’Brien to her position given her history of racially offensive conduct and abusive behavior unless a stay is issued,” the treasurer’s attorneys wrote in court docket filings.
The treasurer’s attorneys make reference to Gordon’s assertion that not reinstating O’Brien could be an act of “futility,” however disagree, saying that the Superior Court docket choose “applied an overly stringent standard for removal” that they declare will not be backed by the regulation establishing the CCC, the definitions of the phrases discovered therein, and related case regulation.
Along with misapplying caselaw, the treasurer’s workplace maintains by means of its attorneys that “the Superior Court did not grant the Treasurer’s comprehensive findings of fact the deference due to the Treasurer as the statutory factfinder and, significantly, the constitutional officer charged by the Legislature with deciding whether O’Brien’s conduct justified her removal as a commissioner.”
Additionally they contend that Gordon “wholly discounted the substantial evidence that supported the Treasurer’s decision” to take away O’Brien.
O’Brien, by means of her spokesperson, indicated that she is prepared and desperate to get again to work on the fee, which she hoped to show round following “recent reports by the State Inspector General and State Auditor” indicating not all is effectively on the company answerable for regulating the state’s largest money crop.
The state’s continued combat to maintain her away from her submit, her spokesperson instructed the Herald, is nothing greater than an additional waste of taxpayer cash.
“It is unfortunate that the Treasurer will not comply with Judge Gordon’s decision ordering Shannon O’Brien to be reinstated immediately given that the Judge does not view the likelihood of success on the merits in any appeal,” O’Brien’s spokesperson mentioned.
The spokesperson added, “By continuing this court battle, it is a further waste and misuse of taxpayer dollars.”
