The city of Vallejo has reached a $1.85 million settlement agreement with two former employees who allege they were wrongfully terminated in 2020, bringing the city’s total payout for the whistleblower lawsuit to nearly $3 million.
Slater Matzke and Will Morat, who worked on Vallejo’s senior leadership team under former city manager Greg Nyhoff, said they have faced financial and professional ruin since raising concerns about allegedly corrupt business dealings, unchecked discrimination, and retaliation by top city officials. Meanwhile, they said, Vallejo officials have dodged accountability.
“In the end, the community is the one that suffers,” Morat said in a Tuesday interview with Open Vallejo. “We spoke out in hopes of changing something. I don’t think anything has changed yet. The people who ignored and retaliated against whistleblowers, they’re still at City Hall, pulling a public paycheck from public dollars.”
Matzke, Morat, and a third former Vallejo employee, Joanna Altman, filed a wrongful termination lawsuit against Vallejo and several top officials in February 2021. The city settled with Altman for $1 million in March. The trio alleged that Nyhoff fired them after learning they had raised concerns about his management of the city during a third-party investigation that they were promised would remain confidential, according to the lawsuit.
Randall Strauss, the whistleblowers’ attorney, said he was thrilled his clients have been vindicated after a years-long court battle.
“I feel like we have proven a case — and the case is that these three clients were whistleblowers who did not deserve what they got for standing up for the people of Vallejo,” he said.
A spokesperson for the city of Vallejo did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Neither did Nyhoff. He resigned from his role in July 2021, leaving Vallejo with a nearly $600,000 severance package. He now works as interim city manager in Mount Pleasant, Texas.
Vallejo has paid out millions in other whistleblower and civil rights lawsuits. In 2023, the city reached a $1 million settlement agreement with former Vallejo police captain John Whitney, who was fired after bringing his concerns about officers commemorating shootings by bending their badges to then-police chief Andrew Bidou. In recent years, it has also settled for $5.7 million with the family of Ronell Foster, $2.8 million with the family of Angel Ramos, and $5 million with the family of Willie McCoy; all of the men were fatally shot by Vallejo officers.
“I would have hoped that any of these cases involving people who lost their lives would have made a difference, and I have not seen it,” Morat said. “That’s extremely disappointing.”
Matzke, who first began working in Vallejo on a contract basis in 2016, most recently served as a special advisor to Nyhoff. Morat began his tenure in Vallejo in 2013 and, after several promotions, served as an assistant to the city manager on economic development. Altman had worked as an assistant to the city manager since 2016, according to the lawsuit. She did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The former employees accused Nyhoff of “graft and corruption,” particularly related to the sale of a 157-acre plot of city-owned land on North Mare Island, according to their lawsuit. The complaint alleges that Nyhoff used his position to cultivate relationships with wealthy land developers, secretly meeting with them twice in Tennessee and cutting out Matzke and Morat, who had been negotiating the deal on behalf of the city.
The former city manager then ordered his staff to re-negotiate the agreement with terms that favored the developers, removing milestones, performance indicators, and benchmarks that would have protected and benefitted Vallejo, according to the lawsuit.
An earlier agreement would have allowed the developer to build on Mare Island through a long-term lease, but Nyhoff’s new deal transferred ownership upon purchase. When Morat declined to water down the development agreement, Nyhoff threatened Morat’s employment, saying he would “find someone who will,” the complaint alleges.
Since the city has failed to investigate the allegedly corrupt negotiation, Matzke and Morat said they took their concerns to the Federal Bureau of Investigation; they do not know the status of any law enforcement investigation.
“There’s no rational explanation for why the deal should have changed so significantly in the way that it did, to unilaterally benefit the developer over the community,” Matzke said.
In 2022, Vallejo sold the land on North Mare Island to The Nimitz Group for $3 million, prompting concerns that it was given away at a fraction of market value. Over the past two years, the company has made little progress in developing the waterfront land, Matzke said, which he characterized as his “worst fears coming true.”
Matzke, Morat, and Altman also said Nyhoff fostered a hostile environment rife with harassment, discrimination, and retaliation. Morat was placed on administrative leave after lodging a complaint with Nyhoff and then-Human Resources Director Heather Ruiz about the ongoing mistreatment of a Black employee by a senior Vallejo official, according to the complaint.
When Matzke raised concerns about the same situation, Nyhoff was “unresponsive and dismissive of the issue,” the complaint alleged. The city’s human resources department eventually closed an investigation into the employee’s complaints of being harassed by a superior, concluding that the claims were “not sustainable,” according to the lawsuit.
The Vallejo City Council launched an investigation into complaints about Nyhoff in 2020. Matzke, Morat, and Altman participated in the third-party investigation and shared their concerns about the city manager, according to the complaint. Investigators told them their complaints would remain confidential. However, the day after the city council concluded its investigation, Nyhoff fired all three.
Christopher Boucher, an attorney contracted by Vallejo to conduct the investigation, told ABC 7 that his findings exonerated Nyhoff but uncovered “bonafide independent reasons” for the city to terminate Morat, Matzke, and Altman. Investigators and city officials also publicly claimed that the group had orchestrated a “coup” to get Nyhoff removed from his position, according to court records. Strauss, the whistleblowers’ attorney, called the statements a “lie.”
“Nothing ever came out of that,” he said. “The city of Vallejo was conspiring to harm them professionally in every way they could.”
Matzke and Morat, who both lived in Vallejo while working for the city, said the incident has “catastrophically” harmed their careers and smeared their reputations in government. Neither has been able to find work in the public sector, a career both said they were drawn to because it would allow them to make a tangible impact in their own community.
Matzke said he has additionally experienced ongoing harassment, including threatening emails from a pseudonymous account and Vallejo police cruisers parked outside his home, making him feel like “a target of my government.” In 2022, the Vallejo City Attorney’s Office hired a company specializing in “deep intel” and “counter intel” investigations to determine whether Matzke, Morat, and Altman were behind anonymous social media accounts critical of Vallejo’s city government.
In addition to the ongoing threats against his former colleague, Morat said the contract gave him “cause for concern,” prompting him to leave the city.
“After years of fighting the battle and having our reputation smeared,” he said, “the place we had lived for 10 years just wasn’t home anymore, and we moved on.”
Matzke still resides in Vallejo and his wife, Andrea Sorce, is campaigning to become the city’s next mayor. For his part, Matzke said he hopes his experience will not deter other potential whistleblowers from stepping forward.
“If I had to do it all over again, I would have done exactly the same thing,” he said, encouraging other government workers to call out wrongdoing. “As lonely as it is and as scary as it is, it’s important that they stand up and they speak out, whether it’s in City Hall proper, the police department, or the fire department. It’s the only way that things will change.”
