A former reporter for the now-defunct print edition of the Tucson Citizen has filed a civil lawsuit against Gannett Co., Inc. and Citizen Publishing, Co. for breach of contract.

The lawsuit for A.J. Flick, who worked for the Citizen for 15 years before its closure this spring, was filed in Pima County Superior Court late Monday night by Adam Watters, a local attorney specializing in employment law.

The specific dollar amount of damages sought by Flick isn’t specified in the complaint, but she said, “It’s less than what some Gannett executives pay for a round of golf,” referring to Robert Dickey, president of Gannett U.S. Community Publishing, paying somewhere between $12,500 and $25,000 in green fees at the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic the day after delivering the news of the Citizen’s sale/closure to stunned reporters and editors.

Dickey told Citizen employees Jan. 15 that the paper was for sale and if it wasn’t sold by March 21, it would be closed. Employees were also given a written statement to that effect, which noted that employees would get one-week severance pay for each year they’d worked at the Citizen if they stayed employed through March 20.

Flick, who covered the courts beat during her final six years at the Citizen, claims Gannett broke its contract when, on March 17, it told Citizen employees that the paper would be open “day to day” because a buyer had surfaced and negotiations were “ongoing.”

“I had a vacation I had already planned and paid for at that time, so I went on that, and then when I got back, I met with my lawyer and our stance was, whatever Gannett asks people to do after the 20^th is a new agreement,” Flick said. “We basically said to them I will come back to work for you indefinitely if you give me my severance now and pay me for the work I do until the paper closes. I had plans to move on after March 20. If they wanted me to work, we’d needed to strike a new agreement. They should have offered me a new contract, but no, they were forcing my hand, asking me to do something extra for them and then they would give me severance. But how would I know they would honor that contract?”

Flick and Watters engaged in a month-long letter exchange with Gannett officials while Flick was on unpaid leave, continuing to argue breach of contract. In mid-April, Flick was warned by interim editor Jennifer Boice that if she didn’t return to work she would be fired. Then, on April 27^th, Flick received notice via certified mail that she was being fired.

“Mark (Evans) had called and said he needed to get my (Citizen) equipment from me and we were having lunch when the certified letter came from Jennifer,” Flick said. Evans was Flick’s direct editor at the time and is the current editor of TucsonCitizen.com, one of only two full-time employees on Gannett’s Tucson payroll.

In her lawsuit, Flick asks for the 15 weeks of severance she feels is due to her because of her 15 years at the Citizen, as well as the value of health benefits she would have received during that severance period, triple that amount in damages, and attorney and legal fees.

“Gannett told me on Jan. 15 of this year that it was putting the Tucson Citizen up for sale and if I were still employed on March 20 and the paper not sold by March 21, I would get one week of severance for every year of employment with all of my health benefits,” Flick said. “I was employed by the Citizen on March 20 and the paper was not sold. However, Gannett tacked on a 12th-hour requirement that employees needed to stay past March 20th, indefinitely, in order to collect severance, contrary to what we were told previously in person and in writing.

“I filed the lawsuit because I held up my end of the bargain and Gannett did not. The lawsuit basically says I relied on Gannett’s promises, to my detriment, and suffered financially.”

Representatives from Gannett were not immediately available to speak about the lawsuit this morning and Boice declined to comment, referring comment to Gannett corporate offices.

Flick, 48, is now pursuing freelance writing and legal research. During her Citizen tenure, she covered a number of sensational trials, including the James Allen Selby serial rapist trial (for which she appeared on an episode of A&E’s “Cold Case Files”) and the Bradley Schwartz and Ronald Bruce Bigger trials for the murder of Tucson eye doctor Brian Stidham.

Flick has won numerous awards, including two for the coverage of the Stidham murder and a second place in the Arizona Associated Press’s public safety reporting category for her story “Prison without bars,” which reported on the Tucson state prison’s Catalina Unit. In 2004, she was part of a team that won first place in Arizona AP’s deadline news reporting for covering a fatal hostage crisis that left three people, including the shooter, dead.

The Tucson Citizen printed its final edition May 16 and TucsonCitizen.com launched May 18.

1. The post I did last week on noise in public libraries was a hot discussion topic both on this blog and out in my neighborhood, so I called Nancy Ledeboer, Pima County Library Director, today to get some information about how local libraries are dealing with concerns over noise. As per normal when one speaks with a librarian, I learned something: Libraries are actually serving a broader range of the public than they did in the past, thus being more “public” than ever.

“We say we’re a public library here to serve everyone in the community,” Ledeboer said. “But the truth is what we were servicing in the past were people from middle class backgrounds who grew up in a culture of using the library.”

But now, she explained, libraries are drawing from all strata of the community because libraries offer more than books. The Internet changed the game in the ’90s, and people who could not afford access to a private computer – or lacked Internet access at home – came to the one free place where they knew they could find both computers and Internet access.

“A whole new group of people began coming to the library library looking for information,” Ledeboer said. “That’s a good thing – we’ve got more and more people acquainted with the library and what a library offers. But it did create a clash of sorts because so many people are using it.”

That clash is often about noise. Ledeboer said it has been an issue at many of the 27 branches in the library system, and each of the libraries is dealing with it in different ways.

“We’ve charged each of our libraries to create a quiet zone, and if they don’t have enough space for a quiet zone, then they are working to create a quiet time. “But frankly, some of our libraries are just too small. In that case, people need to approach a librarian if they feel they are being disturbed. Some people are hypersensitive to noise, and some people don’t know they’re being noisy so it is a matter of finding a find balance where people can all coexist in the libraries. We do have a code of conduct policy posted on our Website that says you’re not allowed to create a disruption that interferes with other people’s use of the libraries, but we don’t have specific ‘no cellphone’ policies.”

Ledeboer also said that the belief that fewer people are reading books because they only use the library for the computers or to hang out after school is a fallacy. She said books circulation is actually way up in the past few years when contrasted to before the time when libraries were community centers, and part of that is because when people come into a library branch to do research on a computer or participate in one of the job clubs or book clubs or get tutoring, they often leave with a book as well.

So, yes, libraries may be more noisy than in the past, but that is because libraries are, thanks to computers, Internet access and the myriad programs offers, actually living up to the “public” in their names in a manner that didn’t happen in the past. And that’s a great thing. See how much you can learn if you talk to a librarian?

2. Yet again, there was a study saying we’re killing ourselves with food. Actually, the report was about how more 60-somethings are disabled now than ever before and that disability is directly attributed to obesity. This is something that really gets on my last nerve because – surprise – we all have the ability to control what we eat. (Well, except for those people who have the syndrome where they eat in their sleep and all that.) We have the ability to get off our tail and go for a walk or something more strenuous. We have the ability to say no or go to food-addiction meetings to get help saying no. But we don’t. How many times do we have to hear that we are killing ourselves by eating this and drinking this and then eating this? With talk of health care all the rage, is anyone besides me wondering if we should put a limit on what a government plan would cover in regards to illnesses caused by obesity? Should healthy taxpayers have to pay for people to get insulin when their diabetes could be controlled with diet but those people refuse to control their food intake? Should we fine parents who let their children get obese? If you want help eating right and exercising, here’s an article you could read. And here is a clue: The sooner you start getting in shape, the better it is for you. It is harder to lose weight with every passing year and the damage is cumulative.

3. And speaking of eating …Thanksgiving is just around the corner and fellow religion blogger Karen Edmisten is asking, “Have you started your Thanksgiving tree?” If you don’t know what one is, check out her blog here. We used to make these when my kids were small and I’m thinking the idea needs to be revisited, especially in this year of loss. Too often we focus on what we don’t have … a Thanksgiving Tree is the cure for that.

4.  John Allen, reporter on all things Catholic and Vatican has come out with a new book, The Future Church: How 10 Trends are Revolutionizing the Catholic Church. In this blog post, he says that if he had to pick a motto for his book it would be “Designed to start arguments, not settle them.” Sounds like my kind of read. Anyway, he is inviting people to read the book and then meet in cyberspace for discussions — should be fun. (And maybe interesting to see who actually shows up.

5. And finally, if you want to do good while you’re searching the Web, add GoodSearch to your browser. You can pick any charity you want and they get funds from your searches. Share, and share alike is what I say.

National Public Radio this morning had a report that included interviews with doctors at Walter Reed Army Medical Center about Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the alleged shooter in yesterday’s Fort Hood massacre. That report came before employees at WR were put on lock down as far as talking to anyone, including the press, and, according to NPR, the FBI.

I can’t find the report on their Web site, although this story mentions briefly how Hasan was reprimanded for proselytizing about Islam when he was in training at the Uniformed Service University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Md. Even though I’m lacking evidence that what I heard in the car this morning wasn’t a product of my imagination, I’m sticking my neck out with a big question: Why didn’t the folks at Walter Reed report this guy as crazy if what they recall happening indeed did happen?

I think it is because there is a fine line between racial/ethnic/religious profiling and pointing out the obvious and people are really afraid of crossing over to the wrong side. Since 9/11 people have been afraid of appearing racist where Muslims are concerned. There’s good reason for that, such as the case of the flying imams.

So, instead of appearing intolerant, people stay quiet, even – sometimes especially – other Muslims. They don’t want to be judged by their religion so they are reluctant to judge others by that rubric, even when they know that the person they are dealing with is dangerous.

A few months after 9/11, I was working on an analysis piece for the Texas Catholic, and I interviewed a Dallas imam about this very thing. I asked him why imams would keep quiet if they knew someone nefarious was in their congregations. He said that if a dangerous Muslim was at a mosque, the best thing was to hope that he – in hearing the moderate, educated teaching preached at the majority of American mosques – would either change his stripes or, “in most cases, we just hope he leaves.” The community wants the crazy guy out of their religious space because, the imam said, lunatics are just as likely to kill other Muslims as anyone else.

In other words, moderate Muslims are trying to protect themselves as much as the rest of us, but in so doing – in not directly going after the crazies among them – they are putting others at risk. Ditto for your average citizen, or the doctors who knew Hasan. Who wants to be called intolerant or a racist? According to the NPR story, Hasan was cold, horrible with patients and fanatical about his religion. Doctors would talk about him in the hallway, the report said, asking themselves if he could be a terrorist or if he was just a really bad doctor.

Who knows if that is what drew him to kill people at Fort Hood? We won’t know until the investigation is complete, or until he talks. (And once he gets a lawyer, fat chance of him talking). But what we do know is that he was not a very warm, caring doctor – even by military standards – and people noticed that early on. They noticed that he seemed more concerned with his religion than his schooling and treatment of soldiers. They noticed that he used  medical lecture slot to preach the Quran. And yet he continued at the medical school, worked at the hospital, moved on like low-achieving students who are socially promoted because the grade they are leaving just wants them out of their hair.

What happened at Fort Hood shows that common sense really needs a shot in the arm. We don’t necessarily have to go all Hannity on folks, but we need to stop being so afraid of speaking up when craziness is staring us in the face.