Justin Jobes, a Firefighter/EMT for the City of Bellevue, Washington, refused to comply with the City’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate. He claimed that receiving any available COVID-19 vaccine would violate his sincerely held religious beliefs. The City, rather than simply terminate him, offered Jobes five different accommodations. Jobes rejected every single one.
The City first offered Jobes a utilities position. Jobes turned it down. He then requested paid medical leave for stress related to the vaccine mandate. The City granted that request and provided him five months of paid leave. As the end of his medical leave approached, the City offered him three more positions: Emergency Management Coordinator, LTE Grants Coordinator, and Fire Prevention Program Analyst. None of these jobs required contact with patients, and the Fire Prevention position would have allowed Jobes to remain within the City’s Fire Department. Jobes refused all three. The City persisted. It contacted Jobes again and offered him a Fire Prevention Officer position within the Fire Department. Jobes declined and ultimately resigned from his position.
After Jobes resigned and the City lifted its vaccine mandate, the City reached out once more. A Fire Chief advised Jobes that there was a pathway for him to return to his old job as a Firefighter/EMT. Jobes declined this final offer as well.
Jobes sued the City in the Western District of Washington, alleging religious discrimination and failure to accommodate under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Washington Law Against Discrimination. The City moved for summary judgment. The district court granted the motion from the bench, issuing an oral order rather than a written memorandum. The district court concluded that the City had carried its burden on the affirmative defense of reasonable accommodation, and separately that the City also would have prevailed on undue hardship.
Jobes appealed to the Ninth Circuit. His first argument was procedural: he contended that the district court’s issuance of an oral rather than a written order automatically required reversal. A unanimous panel of Circuit Judges Hawkins, Clifton, and R. Nelson rejected that argument. The panel noted that Ninth Circuit precedent squarely holds that a written memorandum is not necessary to grant summary judgment. A reasoned oral order combined with the order granting summary judgment suffices.
Turning to the merits, the Ninth Circuit affirmed. Because Jobes had made a prima facie claim of religious discrimination under Title VII, the City could rebut that claim through an affirmative defense. To succeed, the City needed to show that it initiated good-faith efforts to accommodate Jobes’ religious practices reasonably, or that it could not reasonably accommodate him without undue hardship. The Panel applied the standard recently reaffirmed in Petersen v. Snohomish Regional Fire & Rescue, a 2025 Ninth Circuit decision arising from the exact same context — a firefighter seeking religious exemption from a COVID-19 vaccine mandate.
The Panel held that the City had carried its burden on the affirmative defense. The City repeatedly offered reasonable accommodations, and Jobes repeatedly declined them. The Panel further noted that, under Petersen, the City also would have prevailed on its alternative affirmative defense of undue hardship, as the district court had concluded. In Petersen, the Ninth Circuit held that accommodating a firefighter’s religious objection to the COVID-19 vaccine would impose an undue hardship because unvaccinated firefighters pose a heightened risk of infection to vulnerable patients and because vaccinating a workforce is essential to maintaining public confidence in emergency responders. The same reasoning applied here.
Jobes v. City of Bellevue, 2026 WL 1480254 (9th Cir. May 27, 2026).