LA County sinks reinstatement deals sheriff’s chiefs struck with fired deputies

First, the court found that the sheriff’s power to hire, suspend, and fire employees does not implicitly include the power to settle discipline appeals. Allowing that, the court reasoned, would undermine the county’s civil service system, which deliberately splits authority among the sheriff, the director of personnel, and the commission to guard against favoritism and corruption. The court pointed to a telling episode: a prior sheriff had tried to reinstate a deputy fired under a previous sheriff’s watch – exactly the kind of risk the system is designed to prevent. 

There was a dollar-and-cents problem too. If department officials could unilaterally reverse firings, they could commit the county to back-pay obligations – potentially well beyond the $20,000 cap that even county counsel cannot exceed without board approval. 

Second, the court found that an internal department policy describing a process for chiefs to settle discipline appeals did not amount to a lawful grant of authority from the Board of Supervisors. The deputies argued that department management had negotiated the policy with ALADS under California’s public-sector collective bargaining law, making it binding on execution. The court disagreed: the deputies never showed those managers had the power to bind the county in the first place. 

Third, ALADS argued a decades-long “past practice” of chiefs settling discipline appeals – allegedly dating to 1980 – made the arrangement binding. The court found ALADS never demonstrated that scrapping the practice triggered any obligation under collective bargaining law, because it never showed the change significantly affected wages, hours, or working conditions. 

Fourth, a 2013 appellate decision involving a different ALADS settlement could not block the county from contesting these ones. That earlier case dealt with the department’s procedures for investigating officer-involved shootings – a different issue entirely.