Costa Mesa employee lawsuit delayed
The trial date for a lawsuit seeking to block a City Council decision to lay off Costa Mesa workers and replace them with contractors has been delayed.
The trial set for April 9 in Orange County Superior Court was rescheduled for July 24, according to court documents.
The two parties — the city of Costa Mesa and Costa Mesa City Employees Assn. — agreed Thursday to hold the trial until after the California 4th District Court of Appeal has ruled on Judge Tam Nomoto Schumann’s temporary injunction against the city, according to CMCEA’s attorney, Richard A. Levine.
City spokesman Bill Lobdell said the injunction raises a lot of the same concerns that the trial would. He cited the city’s effort to save both time and money on duplicative issues.
Levine, of the Santa Monica law firm Silver, Hadden, Silver, Wexler + Levine, agreed with Lobdell.
“I think there’s an interest in both sides in trying to litigate this case as efficiently as possible,” he said. “It seems logical to hear from the Court of Appeal on one of the primarily legal issues in the case before the trial commences.”
Last year, Costa Mesa gave layoff notices to some 200 city employees — a move that seeks to replace them with outside contractors. In turn, the employees union sued the city, arguing that the proposed layoffs were illegal.
The injunction, however, prevents the city from outsourcing to private entities, but the city can still send and collect bids for outsourced services to evaluate whether they make sense from a financial and services standpoint.
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