San Diego Allowed to Drop Race, Sex Hiring Quotas

A federal judge approved a request Wednesday by the City of San Diego and the Justice Department to delete hiring quotas for minority and women city employees from a 1977 federal decree governing city employment policy.

The action was the first joint effort by federal and local officials to erase such numerical affirmative-action goals.

By either meeting or exceeding the quotas, San Diego already has achieved many of the consent decree’s objectives, Assistant Atty. Gen. William Bradford Reynolds, the nation’s chief civil rights enforcer, said before the ruling by U.S. District Judge Edward J. Schwartz.

“It’s simply a recognition of our progress,” Deputy City Atty. Tom Bromfield said.

50 Cities Chosen

San Diego is one of 50 cities and counties where the Justice Department wants to drop the hiring goals on the basis of a Supreme Court decision last June, although the city had petitioned for elimination of the affirmative-action quotas even before the high court’s ruling. Joint motions with other jurisdictions are under consideration, department spokesman John Wilson said.

The joint request, filed in federal court in San Diego on Wednesday and announced in Washington, was made as the House Judiciary Committee approved legislation to block the Justice Department from attempting to reopen consent decrees that include race and sex quotas. By a vote of 21 to 8, House Republicans lost an effort to eliminate the provision from a fiscal 1986 departmental authorization bill.

California Rep. Don Edwards (D-San Jose), chairman of the House panel’s civil rights subcommittee, said that Administration officials are trying to reopen settled cases “based on their weird interpretation” of the high court’s ruling in a case involving the Memphis Fire Department.

But Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.), who led the fight against the provision, declared that the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which outlawed employment discrimination, had called for “race-neutral, color-blind law enforcement.”

1976 Lawsuit

The consent decree in the San Diego case resulted from a 1976 suit by the Justice Department that accused the city and San Diego County of illegal discrimination against women and minorities. In January, 1983, the county asked a federal court to dissolve the decree against it, but Schwartz turned down that request in April of that year. San Diego County is also among the 50 jurisdictions where the Justice Department now wants to drop the hiring quotas.

The joint request Wednesday made no mention of the Memphis case, but Reynolds, in a separate statement, said the approved modification “is fully consistent with the Supreme Court decision in the Memphis firefighters’ case, and the city is committed to continuation of its equal employment opportunity program.” In the Memphis case, the court ruled that cities may not be ordered to lay off white workers to save the jobs of minority employees with less seniority.

The Dec. 20, 1977, consent decree established specific goals and guidelines for recruiting, hiring and promoting minorities and women in city government. Among other things, it established as a long-range goal for the hiring of enough blacks and Latinos by the San Diego Fire Department to “approximate their representation in the civilian labor force.” In June, 1984, the Fire Department had an 18.4% minority employment rate while the civilian labor force’s was 18%, according to Wilson.

Moreover, women hold 7.1% of firefighter positions in the city, and two of them have advanced to higher fire engineer positions, the joint request noted. The request gave no indication, however, of how many jobs women held when the decree was issued or of their percentage of the San Diego work force.

The San Diego Police Department was not included in the suit or the consent decree, which is scheduled to remain in effect--although without the numerical goals--for two more years.

Training Cited

The joint motion said that San Diego has established effective training programs designed to enable minorities and women to move into specific job categories and that its apprenticeship program for skilled trades has advanced minorities and women into journeyman-level jobs.

Although it deleted numerical goals, San Diego agreed to continue to hire and promote qualified applicants on a non-discriminatory basis and to report to the Justice Department annually on its employment activities.

Reynolds declined to specify how many of the 50 cities and counties have said they would join the department in asking that the numerical quotas be dropped. Sixteen of them are in the three Eastern and Southern federal judicial circuits where appellate courts have held that the Memphis firefighters’ case does not apply to hiring or promotion, thus blocking any such move unless those rulings are overturned.

Times staff writer Scott Harris in San Diego contributed to this story.