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Orange County's effort to get out of its contractual pension agreement with its deputies is quickly becoming a money pit. The county has already paid more than half a million dollars to four law firms in just the last year to research and develop a strategy for a legal challenge. And that's before supervisors have even decided to take the case to court. The hours billed by attorneys and the number of firms involved indicate the county's extraordinary effort to nullify its own labor pact.
County officials around the nation are watching proceedings in Orange County very closely in the hopes that they will also be able to get out of their pension obligations through legal gymnastics.
The county has refused to produce any of the opinions or other work the firms have done, citing attorney-client privilege. However, two of the four firms have concluded that the case is not legally viable.
In a recent interview with Christian Berthelsen of the Los Angeles Times, Supervisor Chris Norby said Kirkland & Ellis, one of the firms retained by the County, believes it may have found a way to get the County off the hook. The legal challenge faces an uphill battle because state and federal laws, as well as constitutional protections, generally safeguard worker pensions from employers who want to roll them back.
But as we all know, the Constitution ain't what she used to be. In San Diego, lawsuits seeking to undo that city's pension agreements with public employee unions were resoundingly defeated, creating $1 million in legal bills for the city and an additional $1.5 million in attorneys' fees that went to cover the legal costs for the defendants who won. Orange County officials are hoping to avoid a similar fate.
In recent years, Orange County, much like cities and other counties throughout California, awarded generous benefit packages to employees when the economy was good. But now when the stock market is falling, they are facing the prospect of covering the steep costs that are a result of those generous arrangements.
Orange County reached a pension deal with the sheriff's deputies union in 2001, allowing deputies to retire at 50 with an average pension of about $70,000 a year. But the structure of the deal, which awarded retroactive benefits that had not been paid for by either the deputies or the county, created a huge shortfall in the amount of money the pension fund will need over time to cover costs.
"The County has now spent over a half-million dollars of taxpayers' money and gone through four sets of law firms attempting to find one that agrees with them," Wayne Quint, president of the deputies union, told the L.A. Times. Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites        
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