More than year after Richard Mineards filed for summary judgment
against Wendy McCaw in his 11-year lawsuit against the Santa Barbara
News-Press for reinstatement and back pay, he heard on September 4 that he
had won, Mineards said. A final hearing takes place in about three months, at
which time a final reckoning will be held on what he is owed after being laid
off in 2009.
The irony, Mineards observed, was that he was told he was
being let go as a cost-cutting measure. "She's had 10 law firms in 10
years," he said of McCaw, but being represented by National Labor
Relations Board attorneys "hasn't cost me a penny." Mineards had
started working at the paper in 2007, after many editors and staffers quit in
protest or were fired starting in 2006.
When word got around he'd been dismissed, Jim Buckley at the Montecito Journal offered him a column, "Montecito Miscellany." Shortly before his new column was published, Mineards said, the News-Press editor at the time, Don Katich, asked him back at the same rate. Though McCaw did not appeal Mineards' federal court win, she tried to argue the sum should be reduced because Mineards could have gotten a higher-paying job than the Montecito Journal.