A court has dismissed a lawsuit by police against San Diego City Attorney Mike Aguirre. Aguirre has been trying to reduce pension benefits given away in 2002 by Mayor Dick Murphy, with support from Ann Smith of the MEA. The purpose of the giveaway was to keep unions quiet about a billion-dollar underfunding of the city pension system.Voice of San Diego
by WILL CARLESS
September 4, 2008
Court Loss for City Cops
In another legal loss for city cops, a federal court judge has dismissed a lawsuit brought by more than 1,500 city police officers against City Attorney Mike Aguirre and the city's retirement system.
The police officers had argued that their federal constitutional rights were violated when, in 2005, the city reduced or eliminated their employment benefits by mandating that police officers pay higher payments into their retirement plans, thus reducing the take-home pay of many officers.
In her decision yesterday, Judge Marilyn Huff dismissed the case, referring in her decision to an earlier decision she made in a related case brought by the Police Officers Association, the union that represents city police officers.
Huff ruled in that case that there was insufficient proof that the employment benefits that were reduced in 2005 were vested constitutional rights, and that the under-funding of the pension system doesn't implicate federal constitutional rights.
This was the second court loss for city police officers in two weeks. On Aug. 21, another federal court judge dismissed a lawsuit brought against the city by more than 700 officers for breach of contract and unpaid overtime.
"So much for Aguirre never winning a lawsuit," said Executive Assistant City Attorney Don McGrath, who represented Aguirre in the lawsuit. McGrath said that, by his count, the POA has lost six of the seven lawsuits it brought against the city and Aguirre.
Showing posts with label pension lawsuit. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pension lawsuit. Show all posts
Friday, September 05, 2008
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Mike Aguirre continues to win against firms involved in pension mess
Voice of San Diego
by DAVID WASHBURN
July 29, 2008
San Diego City Attorney Michael Aguirre has settled another of his lawsuits against firms retained by the city before and during the pension meltdown.
Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, the city's former bond counsel, has agreed to pay $2.88 million to settle a case filed by Aguirre in 2005, which alleged that the San Francisco-based firm failed the city by not discovering problems with the pension fund sooner.
The city will net $1.88 million from the settlement after paying expenses and a contingency fee to outside lawyers Bryan Vess and Dan Stanford, who assisted in the case, Aguirre said...
To date, Aguirre said he has recovered a net of more than $9 million from outside lawyers, accountants and consultants somehow involved in the pension crisis.
by DAVID WASHBURN
July 29, 2008
San Diego City Attorney Michael Aguirre has settled another of his lawsuits against firms retained by the city before and during the pension meltdown.
Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, the city's former bond counsel, has agreed to pay $2.88 million to settle a case filed by Aguirre in 2005, which alleged that the San Francisco-based firm failed the city by not discovering problems with the pension fund sooner.
The city will net $1.88 million from the settlement after paying expenses and a contingency fee to outside lawyers Bryan Vess and Dan Stanford, who assisted in the case, Aguirre said...
To date, Aguirre said he has recovered a net of more than $9 million from outside lawyers, accountants and consultants somehow involved in the pension crisis.
Saturday, June 14, 2008
Aguirre has recovered $10 million, more than he's spent in pension lawsuits
Mike Aguirre's campaign for reelection just got a big shot in the arm. His accusers must now admit that his aggressive pursuit of those who defrauded San Diego in the pension scam and related investigations has paid off for the city.
$4.35 million settlement in pension lawsuit
Law firm represented city before the SEC
By Craig Gustafson
San Diego Union Tribune
June 14, 2008
Vinson & Elkins, the Houston-based law firm whose two-year investigation into San Diego's finances was criticized as a whitewash, has agreed to settle with the city for $4.35 million.
The firm would be the fourth to settle lawsuits related to financial and legal troubles from the city practice of increasing employee pension benefits while cutting funding for them.
Settlements
Pension-related settlements:
July 2006: Two auditing firms, Caporicci & Larson and Calderon, Jaham & Osborn, paid $1.65 million total to the city. Calderon conducted the city's annual financial audits, which were later found to contain million of dollars in errors. Caporicci, of Costa Mesa, later bought the firm and denied any wrongdoing by itself or Calderon.
November 2006: San Francisco-based Callan Associates, a pension consultant that advised San Diego's retirement system, agreed to pay $4.5 million to the city. City Attorney Michael Aguirre accused them of faulty investment advice. The firm admitted to no wrongdoing.
City Attorney Michael Aguirre classified the settlement as a victory for his pension-related lawsuits, even though he had sought $10 million.
Vinson & Elkins, which also represented Enron, admitted no wrongdoing but agreed to pay back $3.25 million to the city and forgive $1.1 million in outstanding bills, Aguirre said. The City Council will vote Tuesday on the settlement...
$4.35 million settlement in pension lawsuit
Law firm represented city before the SEC
By Craig Gustafson
San Diego Union Tribune
June 14, 2008
Vinson & Elkins, the Houston-based law firm whose two-year investigation into San Diego's finances was criticized as a whitewash, has agreed to settle with the city for $4.35 million.
The firm would be the fourth to settle lawsuits related to financial and legal troubles from the city practice of increasing employee pension benefits while cutting funding for them.
Settlements
Pension-related settlements:
July 2006: Two auditing firms, Caporicci & Larson and Calderon, Jaham & Osborn, paid $1.65 million total to the city. Calderon conducted the city's annual financial audits, which were later found to contain million of dollars in errors. Caporicci, of Costa Mesa, later bought the firm and denied any wrongdoing by itself or Calderon.
November 2006: San Francisco-based Callan Associates, a pension consultant that advised San Diego's retirement system, agreed to pay $4.5 million to the city. City Attorney Michael Aguirre accused them of faulty investment advice. The firm admitted to no wrongdoing.
City Attorney Michael Aguirre classified the settlement as a victory for his pension-related lawsuits, even though he had sought $10 million.
Vinson & Elkins, which also represented Enron, admitted no wrongdoing but agreed to pay back $3.25 million to the city and forgive $1.1 million in outstanding bills, Aguirre said. The City Council will vote Tuesday on the settlement...
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Scott Lewis explains the Mike Aguirre-City Council-pension lawsuit connection
From Voice of San Diego
by Scott Lewis
Having It Both Ways
http://voiceofsandiego.org/opinion/slop/
A reader, who is an attorney, wrote me an e-mail about the revived ambiguity surrounding the 2005 vote (or non-vote) the City Council supposedly took to authorize City Attorney Mike Aguirre's legacy lawsuit to roll back city employee pension benefits.
Remember yesterday's reminder of what Council President Scott Peters argues: that Aguirre only received authorization to sue in his own name.
Here's the attorney:
I too have always been confused on how that went down. I'm not sure what it means to authorize Aguirre to sue in his own name? He's the City Attorney for crying out loud! Did they mean he could sue as an individual? In that case, he really didn't need their permission.
What also always irritated was that if the Council felt like their position on this was misunderstood and they really did not want him to file the suit, why did they not revote and clarify their position at the next Council meeting or anytime thereafter??? Don't get me wrong I absolutely believe the City Attorney can not file this type of lawsuit without Council approval. I just thought they left him an out with their ambiguity and never clarified as they most certainly could have.
This is a vitally important point. If the City Council never authorized Aguirre to sue to roll back what he claimed were illegal pension benefits, why in the world did they never do a single thing about it?
This may be why the issue is coming up now. One of the big arguments Peters and the gang looking to throw Aguirre out of office will undoubtedly use is the meme that Aguirre has been a reckless litigator.
If he has been a reckless litigator, his most reckless litigation is the pension lawsuit. But how can Peters (and his colleague Brian Maienschein) possibly argue that this was as reckless as they say if they authorized him to file the lawsuit?
The State Bar, by investigating this, is enabling Peters and Maienschein to float the idea that they never did authorize the litigation.
It should be remembered, of course, that they never did anything to stop it either.
But regardless, this can all be cleared up if the City Council would release the transcript of what really happened at that meeting. But they decided only to give the transcript to the State Bar.
How convenient.
-- SCOTT LEWIS
Wednesday, February 20 -- 3:02 pm
Click here to post comments (3 posted so far)
The Meeting in Question
E-MAIL POST
In light of today's U-T report on the State Bar investigation into City Attorney Mike Aguirre, I'm having flashbacks of a series of columns I did in 2005 about the meeting that is apparently at the center of the Bar's probe.
Flashback with me: Watching a City Council meeting in August of that year, I was shocked to see then Assistant City Attorney Les Girard quietly announce that the City Council had authorized City Attorney Mike Aguirre to sue to get rid of pension benefits he thought city employees had illegally secured.
It was a stunner. I rewound the tape a couple of times to make sure I understood him because the City Council had, until that point, never been too enthusiastic about Aguirre's expressed desire to completely roll back benefit enhancements city employees had secured in the 90s and in 2002.
So I called Aguirre to confirm and wrote up what I thought was big news.
Don "The Rat" McGrath today tries to explain the city attorney's side.
It suddenly got the attention of both union leaders and a blogger named Pat Flannery neither of whom completely believed me until they too saw the tapes. When Ann Smith, the lawyer for the city's Municipal Employee Association heard about it, she wanted to know what was going on as well and sent a letter to the City Council asking.
I wrote up a followup after asking a couple of City Council members.
On Aug. 9 just before the City Council broke its meeting to go to lunch (at 1 hour, 43 minutes into the archived video on the city's Web site -- for the really interested), Assistant City Attorney Les Girard made this announcement:
"Last week in closed session, by a unanimous vote, the City Council authorized the city attorney to pursue a modified cross complaint in the action of SDCERS v. the city of San Diego and City Attorney Michael Aguirre."
Heck, it's my blog, I'm just going to reprint the best part of the column here:
In an interview Aug. 12, Aguirre said that the council had "joined the city attorney" in his legal pursuits against the pension board on the condition that he drop his contention that individuals named in the suit be held personally liable for their actions. That was how the complaint was "modified," Aguirre said.
"This is an area where the City Council has chosen to support the city attorney," he said.
He reaffirmed his statements last week.
But relations among the city leaders have apparently deteriorated so badly that they can't even agree on what official actions they have taken.
Deputy Mayor Toni Atkins released a one-line reaction.
"The Council took no action nor a position on benefits being legal or illegal nor allowing the City Attorney to be counsel for the [San Diego City Employees' Retirement System] board," Atkins said.
Since it's the only statement we have from her on this, we have to take each word for what its worth.
Let's see that again: "The Council took no action nor a position on benefits being legal or illegal."
So what did they do? Why did Les Girard announce in an open council session that "the City Council authorized the city attorney to pursue a modified cross complaint ..."
Is that not an "action"?
Atkins' colleague, Councilman Scott Peters, acknowledges that the council took an action, just not an action with the impact Aguirre describes.
Here's Peters' take.
"...the City Council has authorized the city attorney to allege illegality in his name only," Peters wrote (emphasis added) in a memorandum to Aguirre disputing language Aguirre uses in court documents.
Peters made his case to Voice of San Diego Thursday.
"No one has signed on to his view that the benefits are illegal. He has been authorized to make that argument in his own name but not on behalf of the City Council or the City of San Diego," Peters said. "I would never have voted to authorize him to litigate this illegality issue if the retirement board hadn't brought it up."
Peters said the authorization the council granted Aguirre "in no way" signifies official City Council support for Aguirre's legal maneuver.
Isn't it, however, a bit more supportive than, say, not authorizing him?
Peters explained that, in this instance, it's the retirement board's fault. The pension system, in July, filed a complaint asking a judge to determine if -- in light of Aguirre's blistering investigative reports -- benefits it was paying out were illegal or not.
The pension board had also filed a lawsuit against Aguirre after he tried to take over the attorney chair at the agency.
Now, fast forward two-and-a-half years and the state bar apparently is suspicious of whether the City Council actually did give Aguirre authorization to do the lawsuit or not. And that, we're all assuming, must be something the Bar has a serious problem with. The Bar, according to the U-T's Alex Roth, has asked for a transcript of the secret meeting Girard had referred.
Let's just say that if the City Council does waive the right to keep that transcript private, I will be the first in line to get a copy. It never was entirely clear what the City Council authorized and didn’t.
But I'll repeat this one point I've been making for a couple of years now: Aguirre always argued that he didn't need the City Council to approve his litigious actions yet in times like this, he sought and trumpeted their approval. If he didn't need their approval and really believed that, he probably would never have sought it.
-- SCOTT LEWIS
Tuesday, February 19 -- 1:07 pm
by Scott Lewis
Having It Both Ways
http://voiceofsandiego.org/opinion/slop/
A reader, who is an attorney, wrote me an e-mail about the revived ambiguity surrounding the 2005 vote (or non-vote) the City Council supposedly took to authorize City Attorney Mike Aguirre's legacy lawsuit to roll back city employee pension benefits.
Remember yesterday's reminder of what Council President Scott Peters argues: that Aguirre only received authorization to sue in his own name.
Here's the attorney:
I too have always been confused on how that went down. I'm not sure what it means to authorize Aguirre to sue in his own name? He's the City Attorney for crying out loud! Did they mean he could sue as an individual? In that case, he really didn't need their permission.
What also always irritated was that if the Council felt like their position on this was misunderstood and they really did not want him to file the suit, why did they not revote and clarify their position at the next Council meeting or anytime thereafter??? Don't get me wrong I absolutely believe the City Attorney can not file this type of lawsuit without Council approval. I just thought they left him an out with their ambiguity and never clarified as they most certainly could have.
This is a vitally important point. If the City Council never authorized Aguirre to sue to roll back what he claimed were illegal pension benefits, why in the world did they never do a single thing about it?
This may be why the issue is coming up now. One of the big arguments Peters and the gang looking to throw Aguirre out of office will undoubtedly use is the meme that Aguirre has been a reckless litigator.
If he has been a reckless litigator, his most reckless litigation is the pension lawsuit. But how can Peters (and his colleague Brian Maienschein) possibly argue that this was as reckless as they say if they authorized him to file the lawsuit?
The State Bar, by investigating this, is enabling Peters and Maienschein to float the idea that they never did authorize the litigation.
It should be remembered, of course, that they never did anything to stop it either.
But regardless, this can all be cleared up if the City Council would release the transcript of what really happened at that meeting. But they decided only to give the transcript to the State Bar.
How convenient.
-- SCOTT LEWIS
Wednesday, February 20 -- 3:02 pm
Click here to post comments (3 posted so far)
The Meeting in Question
E-MAIL POST
In light of today's U-T report on the State Bar investigation into City Attorney Mike Aguirre, I'm having flashbacks of a series of columns I did in 2005 about the meeting that is apparently at the center of the Bar's probe.
Flashback with me: Watching a City Council meeting in August of that year, I was shocked to see then Assistant City Attorney Les Girard quietly announce that the City Council had authorized City Attorney Mike Aguirre to sue to get rid of pension benefits he thought city employees had illegally secured.
It was a stunner. I rewound the tape a couple of times to make sure I understood him because the City Council had, until that point, never been too enthusiastic about Aguirre's expressed desire to completely roll back benefit enhancements city employees had secured in the 90s and in 2002.
So I called Aguirre to confirm and wrote up what I thought was big news.
Don "The Rat" McGrath today tries to explain the city attorney's side.
It suddenly got the attention of both union leaders and a blogger named Pat Flannery neither of whom completely believed me until they too saw the tapes. When Ann Smith, the lawyer for the city's Municipal Employee Association heard about it, she wanted to know what was going on as well and sent a letter to the City Council asking.
I wrote up a followup after asking a couple of City Council members.
On Aug. 9 just before the City Council broke its meeting to go to lunch (at 1 hour, 43 minutes into the archived video on the city's Web site -- for the really interested), Assistant City Attorney Les Girard made this announcement:
"Last week in closed session, by a unanimous vote, the City Council authorized the city attorney to pursue a modified cross complaint in the action of SDCERS v. the city of San Diego and City Attorney Michael Aguirre."
Heck, it's my blog, I'm just going to reprint the best part of the column here:
In an interview Aug. 12, Aguirre said that the council had "joined the city attorney" in his legal pursuits against the pension board on the condition that he drop his contention that individuals named in the suit be held personally liable for their actions. That was how the complaint was "modified," Aguirre said.
"This is an area where the City Council has chosen to support the city attorney," he said.
He reaffirmed his statements last week.
But relations among the city leaders have apparently deteriorated so badly that they can't even agree on what official actions they have taken.
Deputy Mayor Toni Atkins released a one-line reaction.
"The Council took no action nor a position on benefits being legal or illegal nor allowing the City Attorney to be counsel for the [San Diego City Employees' Retirement System] board," Atkins said.
Since it's the only statement we have from her on this, we have to take each word for what its worth.
Let's see that again: "The Council took no action nor a position on benefits being legal or illegal."
So what did they do? Why did Les Girard announce in an open council session that "the City Council authorized the city attorney to pursue a modified cross complaint ..."
Is that not an "action"?
Atkins' colleague, Councilman Scott Peters, acknowledges that the council took an action, just not an action with the impact Aguirre describes.
Here's Peters' take.
"...the City Council has authorized the city attorney to allege illegality in his name only," Peters wrote (emphasis added) in a memorandum to Aguirre disputing language Aguirre uses in court documents.
Peters made his case to Voice of San Diego Thursday.
"No one has signed on to his view that the benefits are illegal. He has been authorized to make that argument in his own name but not on behalf of the City Council or the City of San Diego," Peters said. "I would never have voted to authorize him to litigate this illegality issue if the retirement board hadn't brought it up."
Peters said the authorization the council granted Aguirre "in no way" signifies official City Council support for Aguirre's legal maneuver.
Isn't it, however, a bit more supportive than, say, not authorizing him?
Peters explained that, in this instance, it's the retirement board's fault. The pension system, in July, filed a complaint asking a judge to determine if -- in light of Aguirre's blistering investigative reports -- benefits it was paying out were illegal or not.
The pension board had also filed a lawsuit against Aguirre after he tried to take over the attorney chair at the agency.
Now, fast forward two-and-a-half years and the state bar apparently is suspicious of whether the City Council actually did give Aguirre authorization to do the lawsuit or not. And that, we're all assuming, must be something the Bar has a serious problem with. The Bar, according to the U-T's Alex Roth, has asked for a transcript of the secret meeting Girard had referred.
Let's just say that if the City Council does waive the right to keep that transcript private, I will be the first in line to get a copy. It never was entirely clear what the City Council authorized and didn’t.
But I'll repeat this one point I've been making for a couple of years now: Aguirre always argued that he didn't need the City Council to approve his litigious actions yet in times like this, he sought and trumpeted their approval. If he didn't need their approval and really believed that, he probably would never have sought it.
-- SCOTT LEWIS
Tuesday, February 19 -- 1:07 pm
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