Opinion ID: 707846
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: California Government Code Sec. 69904

Text: 11 Under California law, the terms of public employment are governed entirely by statute.... Portman v. County of Santa Clara, 995 F.2d 898, 905 (9th Cir.1993). California Government Code Sec. 69904 is the relevant statute governing employment for the superior courts. The statute clearly states that [a]ll personnel appointed by the judges ... shall serve at the pleasure of a majority of the judges of the court and may at any time be removed by the majority of the judges in their discretion. (emphasis added). Thus, while this section defines the at-will nature of court employment, it also creates a statutory right to be removed only by the exercise of discretion of a majority of the judges. Suidan argues that the County violated this right when the court's Executive Officer, Kenneth Martone, acted unilaterally to terminate Suidan's employment. 12 In addressing this claim, the district court held that Martone's actions were authorized under Rule 207 of the California Rules of Court. Rule 207 states that the Executive Officer shall: 13 (1) supervise the court's staff and ... administer a court approved personnel plan or merit system for ... wage and job classification, recruitment, selection, training, promotion, discipline, and removal of employees of the court.... 14 Thus, this rule permits an Executive Officer to supervise and administer personnel plans approved by the court. In the present case, the Superior Court for the County of San Diego adopted and approved such a plan. Under Rule 4.3 of this plan, the Executive Officer was delegated the responsibility for discipline and removal of all employees except juvenile court referees and the Executive Officer. The district court concluded that Martone had been properly delegated the power to terminate employees and that his actions in terminating Suidan did not exceed the scope of that delegated authority. We disagree. 15 Although Rule 207 permits the Executive Officer to supervise and administer court-approved personnel plans, the plans themselves cannot violate a statute. In this case, Government Code Sec. 69904 states that all personnel appointed by the court shall serve at the pleasure of a majority of the judges and may be removed by the majority of the judges in their discretion. The statute does not, however, state that employees serve at the pleasure of the Executive Officer and may be removed by him in his discretion. The court may certainly adopt a personnel plan that facilitates removal of employees by a majority of the judges and that plan could surely be supervised and administered by the Executive Officer. But the court may not adopt a plan that ignores the statutory requirement and delegates to the Executive Officer the discretion to remove an employee when the statute specifies that this is to be exercised by a majority of the judges. That is what the court-approved personnel plan does in this case. The fact that a majority of the judges at some time in the past adopted a personnel plan that delegated this discretion does not fulfill the statutory requirement that removal of an employee be through the exercise of discretion of the majority of the judges. 16 The County has failed to establish in its motion for summary judgment that a majority of the judges ever exercised their discretion to terminate Suidan's employment. Unless they did so, his termination violated California Government Code Sec. 69904. We, therefore, reverse the summary judgment and remand to the district court. In light of our holding on the statutory violation, we need not reach Suidan's constitutional due process or other state law contract claims.