No love lost in O.C. pension quarrel

John Moorlach sat on a restaurant patio last fall with a few of his staff members when a union official representing sheriff's deputies approached the table and asked to shake his hand.

The chance encounter soon turned ugly.

Moorlach, then Orange County treasurer and the recent winner of a vitriolic campaign for county supervisor against a union-backed candidate, refused the overture. Other leaders of the union asked Moorlach to shake hands and were similarly turned down. Someone took a picture of him with his arms folded and posted it on a union blog called the Tin Star.

In just one year, the new Orange County supervisor and Assn. of Orange County Deputy Sheriffs have built up an astonishing amount of bad blood. Moorlach has labeled union activists "thugs," sought an audit of some union finances, and championed an independent review board to handle citizen complaints against law enforcement officers.

Union officials have blamed Moorlach for having to work for nine months without a labor agreement and sought to bar him from attending any deputies' funerals. Even union officials from other parts of the state have joined in the fight against the supervisor, with the Los Angeles Police Protective League declaring Moorlach "an enemy to law enforcement."

The bitter feud climbed to new levels on July 20, when Moorlach proposed that deputies' pensions be pared back, saying the 5-year-old agreement defining benefits was unconstitutional because the sweetened retirement packages contained a retroactive clause that constituted a gift of public funds and gave extra pay for work already performed.

The union has rejected the claim, saying the deal can't legally be undone. The county board is scheduled to take its first vote on the matter Tuesday.

Moorlach's proposal has reverberated across the state as politicians and government workers wait to see whether the challenge to the popular retirement packages will be successful. In recent years, more than 1,000 local and state agencies have awarded retroactive pension benefits to public employee unions, including virtually all of those representing public safety officers.

As a result, according to the conservative California Foundation for Fiscal Responsibility, the state faces at least $12 billion in pension obligations that it has no money to cover.

"He's developing a reputation as sort of a zealot on this issue," said Dave Low, a lobbyist for the California School Employees Assn. and chairman of a group of public employee unions seeking to safeguard pension benefits.