Union Sues City Officials Over Lunch Sessions

The city’s largest public employees’ union is suing the San Diego Civil Service Commission and the city personnel director, charging that they violated the state’s open-meeting law by meeting for lunch on days when the commission was in session.

The Municipal Employees Assn., which represents about 2,500 city workers, also filed another suit in Superior Court in an attempt to force the city’s Personnel Department to release four confidential studies on certain job classifications.

Those reports are needed, union leaders argued, to determine if about two dozen female employees are being properly compensated.

City personnel officials, however, dismissed both lawsuits as merely a union reprisal for the city’s earlier refusal to increase the workers’ salaries by upgrading the four job categories.

“The bottom line is that the MEA is looking for a raise for its members,” said city Personnel Director Rich Snapper. “Had the commission and staff agreed with the MEA (on changing the job classifications), you can bet that they wouldn’t have thought that the reports were public records or that there’s anything wrong with the lunches.”

The MEA lost the first round in the legal battle when a Superior Court judge denied the union’s request to block the commissioners from meeting over lunch at their next scheduled meeting next week. A court hearing on the lawsuit dealing with the job reports will be held Aug. 25, while the other suit on the alleged open-meeting violations will be heard two days later.

In its lawsuit, the MEA contends that Snapper and the five-member commission have routinely violated the Brown Act, which requires public agencies to conduct business in open meetings, by having lunch together on meeting days. The commission, appointed by the City Council, reviews city workers’ salaries and job categories, and hears employees’ appeals of disciplinary actions taken against them.

“All we’re asking the commission to do is conduct its business in public, as the law requires, not in secret over lunch,” said Charles Egbert, acting general manager of the MEA.

Judith Richards, the union’s president, added that many of the commission’s decisions “appear to have been made before they come to hear the . . . side of the employee.”

Snapper, however, characterized the lunches as “nothing more than a simple courtesy” extended to the commissioners, who serve without pay.

“It’s been an established practice for at least 15 years,” Snapper said of the lunches. “That shows that this thing is totally bogus.”

The union’s suit notes that between June, 1985, and March, 1986, Snapper used public funds to pay for more than 60 lunches totaling nearly $3,000 that were attended by some or all of the commissioners. The fact that the city reimbursed Snapper for those lunches suggests, Egbert said, that the lunches served “some official purpose.” The lawsuit points out that Snapper’s expense accounts list commission business such as salary or disciplinary appeal hearings as the purpose of the lunches.

City Atty. John W. Witt said that the lunches “were social in nature, not working business lunches.”

“If there was any table talk among members, it was incidental and not part of the deliberative process at all,” Witt added.

The job-classification studies that the union wants made public deal with, among other things, whether certain job descriptions should be altered--for example, whether senior clerks should be reclassified as office managers and whether intermediate clerk-typists should be renamed referral agents.

Such semantic changes also have a financial effect, with the suggested job classifications generally meaning higher pay for the workers holding those positions. Egbert explained that the four job categories covered by the reports are dominated by female employees, adding that the reports grew out of a “comparable worth” study aimed at determining whether jobs usually occupied by women pay the same as those generally held by men.