Heather Egan and Alex Morse Composite

Former Holyoke city solicitor Heather G. Egan and mayor Alex B. Morse.

(File photos / The Republican)

HOLYOKE — Heather G. Egan sat in Mayor Alex B. Morse's office at City Hall on the afternoon of April 4 and floated the idea of leaving her job.

The mayor embraced the notion of making his city solicitor go away, the Egan-Morse association of 14 months having become torn beyond mending, according to documents obtained by The Republican and MassLive.com and interviews with people familiar with details of the events.

Ultimately, Morse agreed to pay Egan $45,000 because that was the only way she would agree to quit as head of the Law Department while forfeiting the right to file lawsuits she had threatened and staying quiet about an aspect of casino-mitigation negotiations she felt was improper if not illegal, sources said.

The payment became a deal-breaker provision within the separation agreement between Morse and Egan for three reasons, sources said:

Administration officials feared Egan would argue the city's inability to accommodate her caused a chronic medical condition to get worse; and because of that she would sue.

Egan questioned the changes Morse was proposing at the License Board and she discussed possibly filing a whistleblower lawsuit.

Egan threatened to go public with concerns that Morse permitted Rory Casey, who is now the mayor's chief of staff but at the time wasn't a city employee, to participate in negotiations with MGM Resorts International on benefits Holyoke should get as a neighboring community to the gaming giant's planned $800 million casino in Springfield.

The separation agreement and the amount of cash finally agreed upon were fashioned by a flurry of emails and text messages between Morse and Egan in April, electronic doses of drama spiced with warnings to each other to keep it all quiet.

In a phone interview and emails, Egan declined to identify lawsuits she might have filed, saying that revealing such specifics would violate terms of her separation agreement with the city and the attorney-client privilege related to her having been city solicitor. But she said the agreement and $45,000 payment had nothing to do with a leave she had planned to take in April.

Egan addressed what she called the "theory" that a reason the separation agreement included a payment was because it touched on a medical matter.

"I will say that that I did have a planned, two-week leave, which was going to occur in May (of 2014), and this had been approved by the mayor prior to my second appointment as solicitor," she said.

But, she repeated, the planned leave "had nothing, whatsoever" to do with her resignation or the separation agreement.

"I do not believe whether or not the leave was health related should matter, and I will not comment as to whether the leave was for medical reasons or not ...," Egan said.

Two officials have previously alluded in stories published by The Republican and MassLive.com to "medical" matters having a role in the Morse-Egan separation agreement. One was Assistant City Solicitor Kara Cunha in June saying some documents the news outlets sought were off limits because they constituted "personnel and medical files or information."

The other reference to medical matters having a role in the Morse-Egan separation agreement came from state Supervisor of Records Shawn A. Williams in a story published in September. In an Aug. 20 letter to Cunha, in response to an appeal by The Republican and MassLive of a public records request denial, Williams said certain records must be released but among those the city could withhold were Egan's personnel and medical files.

Morse also said in an interview in his office that the separation agreement's nondisclosure clause prevented him from discussing specific lawsuits he was concerned Egan might file against the city.

"Again, as the mayor of the city, I felt it was in the best interest of the city" to execute the separation agreement with Egan, Morse said.

As for Casey's involvement in meetings with MGM, in November and December of 2013, Morse said that there was nothing wrong with that and that Casey was helpful. Casey became chief of staff in early January 2014.

Another argument for giving Egan a separation agreement that included cash payment was that a lawsuit brought by the ex-city solicitor could have left the city uniquely ill-equipped to defend, a source said. That's because of conflicts that could have made the city's own legal staff and the private firm the city has on retainer unavailable, given that both had worked closely with Egan on legal cases and other confidential matters.

To be sure, Morse and Egan wanted to avoid a nightmare of court fights.

They also were eager to get past the bickering about Egan's attendance and ability to get along with other city employees, along with Egan questioning the legality of a Morse order about the License Board, records and interviews show.

But a review of more than 300 pages of emails, texts, letters and other documents in addition to interviews with people with knowledge of pertinent details shows the Egan-Morse relationship had become so troublesome that the mayor and his solicitor came to view a separation agreement as a port in a storm.