Lengthy Delays Seen : Workers’ Comp Judge Rips New Plan for L.A.

The top judge of Los Angeles’ busiest workers’ compensation court charged Tuesday that state plans to staff a new court in Pasadena by shifting workers from neighboring jurisdictions stands to “cripple” an already overwhelmed system and dramatically lengthen the process of resolving injured workers’ complaints.

Presiding Judge Bettina A. Bate of the Workers’ Compensation Appeals Board in Los Angeles said the current 8- to 10-week wait for a trial in cases which both workers and employers say are ready for hearing could expand to as long as a year in a restructuring planned by the state Division of Industrial Accidents.

Officials of the state Division of Industrial Accidents say the opening of the new office is intended to streamline the Los Angeles court and improve service to injured workers in northeast Los Angeles, Burbank, Glendale, Pasadena and portions of the San Fernando and San Gabriel valleys.

‘More People Added to the System’

The change is part of an overhaul of jurisdictional boundaries in the workers’ compensation court system that will add 10 judges in Southern California, said John A. Merrill, statewide assistant chief of the appeals board,

“More people are being added to the system, we’re rearranging the workload to fit, and we’re moving some of the offices to better serve the area,” Merrill explained. “She thinks bigger is better,” he said of Bate’s objections. “We think smaller is easier to manage.”

Roughly half the geographic territory now served by the Los Angeles board will become the responsibility of the new Pasadena board under the state’s plan, scheduled to go into effect Nov. 15. The Los Angeles court will lose four of its 10 judges in the process. Two judgeships, now vacant, will be shifted to Pasadena from Van Nuys, and two more judges will move to Pasadena from the Norwalk court.

But Bate said she doubted that a corresponding portion of the 127,000 cases pending in the Los Angeles court would be shifted to Pasadena. She also questioned the efficacy of Merrill’s plan to bring in clerks from around the state to go through the backlogged cases, one by one, to identify those to be transferred.

Further, Bate said workers and employers in areas far from Pasadena will be inconvenienced by having to travel there to complete cases in which hearings have already been opened by judges who will be moving to the new court.

Hidden Agenda Denied

Attorneys also have objected to the state’s plans, charging they are part of a larger effort by the administration of Gov. George Deukmejian to force drastic reform of the workers’ compensation system by miring it in backlogs and confusion.

“It’s compounding a terrible, terrible problem,” said Gerald C. Benezra, a Los Angeles attorney who is chairman of the workers’ compensation legislation committee of the State Bar of California.

Merrill said there was no hidden agenda to the overhaul. “We want delays to decrease,” he said. “That’s why the whole thing is being done.”

A proposal in Sacramento to drastically revamp the state’s workers’ compensation system remains bogged down in legislative back rooms, with negotiations between business, labor, lawyers, physicians and insurers stalled.