A 12-member jury in Baker County Circuit Court will decide whether Baker City and its former city manager violated a former city firefighter’s rights by firing him in February 2022 after he contracted COVID-19 on the job and was unable to return to that job.

Jason Bybee filed the $800,000 civil complaint against the city and former city manager Jonathan Cannon in August 2023.

The jury was selected Monday morning, March 17.

Attorneys gave their opening statements late in the morning. Testimony will start when the trial resumes at 2 p.m. Monday.

In his 28-minute opening statement, Bybee’s attorney, Richard Meyers, said the city failed to accommodate Bybee’s disability because they didn’t offer him any of five other jobs in the city while Bybee was suffering from the lingering symptoms, including fatigue and “brain fog,” that are known as “Long COVID.”

Myers told the jury that Cannon, who resigned as city manager on July  3, 2023, fired Bybee on Feb. 7, 2022, a week after the city announced two job openings, one as an evidence technician in the police department, the other as a water meter reader in the public works department.

Myers said Bybee, soon after he was fired after a 10-year career with the city fire department, applied for the evidence technician job but was not hired.

“This is when he needed the city to have his back, and they didn’t,” Meyers told the jury.

Myers said Oregon law requires employers to accommodate disabled workers, including reassigning them to a different job if they aren’t medically cleared to do the job they had when they were disabled.

Myers told jurors that before he was fired, Bybee was asked to come to city hall to pick up a “trash bag” containing some of his personal items he had kept at the fire department.

The bag didn’t include Bybee’s badge or his name tag, Myers said.

He also told the jury that the city didn’t allow Bybee to continue using the exercise equipment at the fire department when he was on leave.

“Even before they terminated him they treated him differently,” Myers said.

Luke Reese, the attorney representing the city and Cannon, in his 11-minute opening statement urged the jury, while hearing testimony, to consider what Cannon and other city officials knew at the time they were making decisions, as opposed to what they have learned in the three years since Cannon fired Bybee.

Among the uncertainties, before Bybee was fired, are the effects of long COVID, Reese said.

“This was a new disease,” he told the jury.

Reese said the city accommodated Bybee by allowing him to do “light duty” tasks in the fire department for several weeks in 2021, then, after there was no further work of that sort, continuing Bybee’s disability leave.

The city’s goal throughout, Reese said, was to have Bybee return to his job as a firefighter and EMT when he was medically cleared to do so.

Reese told the jury that the evidence would show that in August 2021 one doctor did clear Bybee to return, but that Bybee sought a second opinion from a doctor who disagreed that he was able to return to work as a firefighter.

Once it was clear in late 2021 that Bybee couldn’t resume his job as a firefighter, Cannon had to decide about Bybee’s future, Reese said.

Reese told jurors that although the city had five job openings while Bybee was on medical leave, Bybee applied only for the evidence technician job.

Reese said witnesses would testify that Bybee lacked the “basic skills and experience” for that job.

Reese told the jury that while Bybee was on leave, Cannon and other city officials had no reason to believe anything but that Bybee’s ultimate goal was to be medically able to return to work as a firefighter, and that Bybee never told city officials otherwise.

“Everybody agrees it’s unfortunate that Mr. Bybee got sick,” Reese said.