The motion – which sought to dismiss the lawsuit – marked the city’s first response since the case was moved to federal district court in late 2013.

Two former Memorial Hospital employees, Margarethe Bench and Kathryn Romstad, claim the city did not follow the proper procedures for pulling roughly 4,000 hospital employees out of the Public Employees’ Retirement Association on Oct. 1, 2012, when the city began leasing the hospital to University of Colorado Health.

For example, they claim the city did not allow employees to vote on whether they wanted to leave the state’s pension fund, according to court documents.

In a motion filed by the city Tuesday, attorneys asked the suit be tossed because no contract explicitly stated the employees would be a part of PERA forever.

Despite citing the employees handbook and other resources, “the factual allegations do not plausibly support the existence of a contract for future PERA participation after the City ceased to employ Plaintiffs,” the motion said.

UCHealth’s pension plan is inferior to the one offered by PERA, the lawsuit alleged. And pediatric division employees now employed by Children’s Hospital Colorado were offered an employee-contribution retirement plan that amounted to “tens of thousands,…

The trio – Ilene Poses, Lisa Haver and Barbara Dowdall – say the violations occurred during a Feb. 18 meeting at which commissioners voted on charter-school applications, according to the suit filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Philadelphia. The plaintiffs are members of the advocacy group Alliance for Philadelphia Public Schools.

The Feb. 18 meeting was contentious, with four people arrested on disorderly-conduct charges, and the plaintiffs were not allowed to display signs opposing new charter-school approvals, the suit says.

Representatives from charter operator KIPP, however, were allowed to distribute and wear T-shirts in support of KIPP schools, the suit says.

The suit also claims that a school police officer named as a defendant, John Augustine, illegally went into Haver’s shopping bag without permission and swiped all the protest signs inside.

“Without cause or justification, and at least in part in retaliation for the exercise of the plaintiff’s First Amendment rights and to chill the exercise of those rights, the defendants seized the plaintiffs, confiscated their signs and violated the plaintiffs’ liberty interests,” the suit says.

A school district spokeswoman said the district would not comment on…

The police union and defendants in the case did not support the settlement.

RYE – The City Council approved a $475,000 settlement Wednesday night to end a federal lawsuit by Andrew Caspi, a resident who claims he was beaten by police during an arrest more than a decade ago when he was 17.

The unanimous vote came after officials learned they did not have sufficient insurance coverage to handle the additional legal fees associated with a trial and the uncertainty of a jury verdict.

The city’s $1 million in insurance coverage will help lower the costs of the settlement, Mayor Joseph Sack said. After a $50,000 insurance deductible and accrued legal fees of $645,000, the settlement will end up costing taxpayers about $170,000, he said.

“It’s incredibly expensive to prep a case for trial,” said Councilman Terrence McCartney, a trial lawyer himself, adding that the police and their lawyers may have been confident but “you never know what a jury’s going to do.”

Talk of a settlement was spurred by the revelation that a police sergeant had written a report critical of one of the arresting officers — a report the city contends had lain unread in a sealed envelope for a decade before it was found three months ago.

But the city also learned in the past week that its excess insurance carrier — which would have covered anything over $1 million in expenses in the case — had…

The class-action lawsuit brought by shareholders claimed Duke Energy, its executives and directors made misrepresentations related to a post-merger CEO change. The settlement covered three consolidated cases in the N.C. federal courts that were filed shortly after the July 2012 merger.

As part of the agreement, Duke and the named executives and directors denied the allegations and any wrongdoing.

Duke said it settled to “avoid the cost of prolonged litigation and eliminate uncertainty for the company” from the lawsuit.

When Duke and Progress agreed to the $32 billion “merger of equals,” Progress chief executive Bill Johnson was expected to lead the combined companies. Duke became the nation’s largest electric utility with 7.1 million customers in six states at the time.

But within hours of closing the deal, the new Duke board promptly fired Johnson and reinstalled Duke CEO Jim Rogers. Johnson is now chief executive of the Tennessee Valley Authority.

The N.C. Utilities Commission launched an investigation of whether the…