Supervisors Usurp Sheriff's Authority To Fire Vaccine Holdouts

LOS ANGELES, CA — Blaming Los Angeles Sheriff Alex Villanueva for his department's weak COVID-19 vaccination rate, the Board of Supervisors Tuesday voted to override the sheriff's authority to discipline employees who fail to comply with the county's vaccine requirement.

The proposal introduced by Supervisors Sheila Kuehl and Holly Mitchell gives the Los Angeles County personnel director authority to discipline deputies who refuse the vaccine. The motion was given preliminary approval on a 4-0 vote, with Supervisor Kathryn Barger abstaining.

The vast majority of the county's coronavirus worker's compensation claims have come from the sheriff's department, which has among the lowest vaccination rates of all county departments. Villanueva has been a vociferous opponent of the county's employee vaccine mandate and has declined to enforce it. His stance and the department's vaccination rate stand in stark contrast to that of the Los Angeles Police Department.

SEE ALSO: LAPD Fires Unvaccinated Officer With 7 More Terminations Pending

On Tuesday, LAPD Assistant Chief Beatrice Girmala announced that one LAPD officer has been fired for violating the city's COVID-19 vaccine mandate and termination proceedings are underway for seven others. About 83 percent of the department's employees are vaccinated compared to less than 60 percent of Los Angeles Sheriff's Department employees.

Kuehl and Mitchell compared the sheriff's department's vaccination rate with the overall countywide employee rate, noting that as of Feb. 1, 81.5% of the county's 100,000 employees were fully vaccinated as required by the mandate. Enforcing the mandate "remains a challenge four months after its issuance," they noted.

"Unsurprisingly, approximately 74% of the more than 5,000 COVID-19- related workers' compensation claims filed by county employees as of Jan. 29, 2022, have been filed by employees in the sheriff's department," according to the motion. "This data illustrates vaccinations' vital role in limiting the spread of COVID-19 and thus, the urgent need to increase vaccination rates across the entire county workforce."

The motion, if approved, would direct county attorneys to work with the CEO and personnel director to develop proposed amendments to county Civil Service rules, giving the personnel director "overriding authority to discipline the employees of any county department for noncompliance with the county's policy or directives related to the policy."

Those proposed amendments would be reviewed by the board at its March 15 meeting for final consideration.

The authority to discipline — or terminate — employees who violate the mandate currently rests with individual department heads, such as the sheriff. The motion states that such an arrangement "has allowed for inconsistent application and enforcement of the policy and wide variety from department to department."

Villanueva, who has encouraged people to consider getting vaccinated, has spoken out against the county's vaccine mandate, saying it would decimate the ranks of what he calls an already depleted department. He said deputies should have the option of undergoing regular testing rather than being forced to get vaccinated.

His critics contend, however, that deputy COVID-related callouts and quarantines are already decimating the ranks, causing the shorstaffed department to rack up overtime costs.

The sheriff spoke via telephone at the beginning of the Board of Supervisors' meeting Tuesday, and called the proposed shift in disciplinary authority a "death blow to public safety in Los Angeles County" that would have little impact.

He said 9,881 department members are fully vaccinated, and in the last 30 days, 342 have tested positive, for a 3.46% positivity rate. Among the 5,766 unvaccinated members, 221 tested positive in the last 30 days, for a 3.83% positivity rate.

"Your motion is going to seek to basically cause us to actually lose 4,000 employees, for a grand total of 0.4% improvement in positivity rate," he said. "(That) is not exactly benefit to public safety. We're coming off two years of a historically high 94% increase in homicide rate, 64% increase in grand theft auto. And this is just not sustainable. The current situation is not sustainable. The hiring freeze is not sustainable.

"... This is ill-advised, illogical and probably in the long run illegal," Villanueva said. "And by the time we figure out the legality of it, we're going to be past the pandemic, which will make the result irrelevant. I urge you to deescalate, dial back the rhetoric and find some common ground -- testing or vaccination, and we're doing that right now."

On Monday, an attorney for the Los Angeles County Professional Peace Officers Association sent a letter to the board objecting to the proposal, saying it would violate the county charter and amount to an overstepping of the board's authority.

"Any attempt to take over the sheriff's ability to oversee the disciplinary process for his employees, it is submitted, would certainly not survive legal scrutiny by the courts who would likely fine the BOS exceeded their authority under well-established legal principals," attorney James Cunningham wrote.

Citing a 1977 court ruling, Cunningham added, "Such supervisory control by the BOS would directly conflict with the admonition that `the board has no power to perform county officers' statutory duties for them or direct the manner in which duties are performed."'

City News Service and Patch Staffer Paige Austin contributed to this report.