Patrol and jail deputies shared a rank but not a schedule - or a pension
A California appeals court ruled a workplace restructuring created a separate pension class for deputy sheriffs - even though their job title never changed.
The Fourth District Court of Appeal on August 14 affirmed a lower court order directing the Orange County Employees Retirement System (OCERS) to include mandatory overtime pay in pension calculations for two retired deputy sheriff IIs who had worked jail operations.
The dispute grew out of a 2008 reorganization of the Orange County Sheriff's Department. After the restructuring, deputy sheriff IIs on patrol and those in jail operations performed significantly different roles. Jail deputies worked a "platoon schedule" that built a mandatory half-hour of overtime - coded as "6FE" - into every two-week pay period. Patrol deputies did not. As of 2019, only 30 of 630 deputy sheriff IIs worked in jail operations.
When the retirees left the department in 2018, they asked OCERS to include the 6FE overtime in their "compensation earnable" - the figure used to calculate pensions under California's County Employees Retirement Law of 1937. OCERS denied the request, determining that because most deputy sheriff IIs worked patrol, the overtime was not "ordinarily worked" by persons in the same grade or class.
An administrative hearing officer recommended including the overtime, but the OCERS Board of Retirement overruled that recommendation and upheld the exclusion in April 2022. The retirees petitioned the Superior Court of Orange County, which granted writs of mandate ordering OCERS to include the 6FE pay.
The appellate panel unanimously affirmed. It found jail-operations deputy sheriff IIs were not "comparable" to patrol deputy sheriff IIs for pension purposes - the two groups had different duties, schedules, work locations, and recruitment requirements. After the 2008 restructuring, deputy sheriff IIs in jail operations performed the same functions as deputy sheriff Is, yet a deputy sheriff I promoted to II was required to leave jail operations for patrol.
The court distinguished Stevenson v. Board of Retirement (2010), where overtime was excluded because it arose from unscheduled investigative hours rather than a fixed schedule.
The opinion was certified for publication on September 11, giving it precedential weight across California's CERL-governed county retirement systems. OCERS was ordered to recalculate both retirees' allowances retroactively to their 2018 retirement dates, with interest.
The decision means public-sector employers face a classification risk: when a restructuring splits one job title into functionally distinct roles, that split can redefine who qualifies as a pension "peer" - regardless of what the formal classification says.
