John Shaterian just wants his job back.

A 1959 graduate of Alameda High School, Shaterian has spent the past decade ferrying important papers and mail between various city offices. His work took him from Alameda Point to Bay Farm Island and all points in between on his 72-mile daily route. It’s work the 65-year-old enjoyed.

Shaterian was fired Jan. 14 after he was assigned a new vehicle, one he didn’t feel was safe. Shaterian, who plied Alameda’s streets in a 1996 Suzuki, was assigned a small golf cart-style electric vehicle in January for his route. “One day I got to work and there was a letter from on my desk, saying ‘You’re the lucky one that gets to drive the first electric vehicle,” he said. “The door wasn’t solid; you could jiggle it. ‘I’m not going to drive this; I don’t feel safe,’ I said to (Shaterian’s immediate supervisor).”

After looking over the vehicle, he didn’t feel comfortable with it. “The vehicles have been deemed suitable for driving on city streets; however, Risk Management says because the maximum speed of the vehicle is 25 miles per hour, they do not have to be crash safety-tested and therefore, these specifications (are not) available,” Shaterian wrote in a letter sent to members of the City Council, the mayor and city manager. He said he has not yet received a response.

Shaterian says he offered to drive his own personal car at work, as long as he was reimbursed, but claims officials rejected his offer as a non-viable long-term solution.

Karen Willis, the city’s human resources director, described the matter as a personnel issue about which she could not comment. When asked if Shaterian was an employee in otherwise good standing, Willis replied, “There’s no doubt about that.”

Alan Cohen, a Bay Area employment attorney, said the law is relatively clear. “The statutory basis for non-retaliation is in the California Labor Code, sections 6310 and 6311. An employer can not retaliate against you for making a safety complaint, even if it is unwarranted...as long as it is in good faith, they can’t fire him,” he said. The question is going to be “Is this a reasonable good-faith question about whether this is a safety violation and an unsafe working condition or is this a reasonable requirement of the job that he’s unwilling to along with? That’s the two sides of the coin here,” Cohen said.

Shaterian said he has not consulted an attorney, but is considering it. Right now, all he wants is to be reinstated.

After lobbying by the golf-cart industry, the National Traffic Highway Safety Administration, the federal body that conducts crash tests, created a new class of “low-speed vehicles” a decade ago. Defined as vehicles with a top speed of 25 miles per hour, they are exempted from crash safety standards applied for other cars and trucks.

“I am not against protecting the environment,” Shaterian wrote in his letter. His concerns are much more pedestrian — he’s just afraid of becoming a crash test dummy for the city’s green initiative. “I’m 65 years old. I don’t have that many years left and I don’t want to cut them short,” he said.

Shaterian said he is not the only one to refuse to drive one of the city’s electric vehicles. According to his letter, “building inspectors refused to use their assigned electric vehicles; they were not threatened with termination. The three vehicles assigned to City Hall West sit unused because employees would rather use their own vehicles (and get mileage reimbursed), but no one has been put on notice.”

The difference may be that while building inspectors are full-time employees with union protection, Shaterian was part-time and, as such, could not join the union.

Shaterian has other complaints about the cars: the electrical charges don’t last — especially if one is using headlights and wipers in the rain. He says that various city departments have tested and rejected electric vehicles in the past, including Alameda Power & Telecom, Building Services, the Golf Complex and Police Department. “No one was terminated ... for not using the vehicle,” he wrote in his letter.

Shaterian said one of his former colleagues who operates an electric vehicle told Shaterian that he was nearly run off the road by a bus. “When you’re going out to Alameda Point to take interoffice mail, on that one road there, that’s a 35-mile-per hour zone ... It’s no more than a glorified golf cart,” he said.