Reforms Are Needed on Stress Disability : Liberal rules make it too easy for public employees to get pension of 50% of salary for life from taxpayers

Six San Diego County sheriff’s deputies may not be held criminally or civilly liable for the 1988 death of jail inmate Albert Varela, but the taxpayers will still have to pay out a record $650,000 to Varela’s 10-year-old daughter.

Equally disturbing is the fact that taxpayers will be paying at least one of the deputies.

He has been granted a stress disability pension amounting to 50% of his salary for life. A second deputy is on temporary disability and has applied for full stress disability.

They are just two of 18 law enforcement officers that have applied for stress disability pensions from the county retirement system.

Thirteen have been granted and five more are pending. These disability cases are an example of a larger problem in law enforcement, other government agencies and in private corporations.

Reform of the state workers compensation system, to make it more difficult to qualify for stress disability payments, is one of the major stumbling blocks to budget negotiations in Sacramento.

The question of stress disability pensions for law enforcement officers is more complicated than for many other jobs.

The job is very stressful. And there has to be some provision for officers who become psychologically disabled.

But, in too many law enforcement agencies, officers accused of misconduct are being awarded pensions for stress-related injuries that they say were caused by discipline, criminal charges filed against them, or negative publicity about what they did.

Publicity was cited by the deputy in the Varela case who is on temporary disability. Deputy John Ellis said in a court deposition that he “was portrayed in the papers and the general public as a person who willfully beat someone to death, and that is not at all what happened.”

The city of San Diego found a simple and effective remedy to the stress disability problem in 1982, when the City Council decided to no longer offer stress retirements to new officers.

Since then, the city says that applications for such pensions have dropped 50% to 75%.

However, that solution is not available to county administrators because the county retirement system is governed by state law.

Regardless of how the budget impasse in Sacramento is resolved, the stress disability issue will undoubtedly be revisited next year.

When the Legislature returns to the issue, it should include the city of San Diego’s solution in its study.