Orange County Deputy Sheriffs Robert Szewczyk and Rodney Morikawa were assigned to jail operations. Unlike deputy sheriffs assigned to patrol, jail deputies worked a mandatory “platoon schedule” of 80.5 hours every two weeks, which included a regularly scheduled half-hour of overtime coded as “6FE.” When the deputies retired, the Orange County Employees Retirement System (OCERS) excluded that overtime from their “compensation earnable” for purposes of calculating their pensions.
The deputies challenged OCERS’ determination by arguing that the overtime was part of their normal working schedule and therefore pensionable under the County Employees Retirement Law of 1937. The California Superior Court agreed. It found that deputy sheriffs assigned to jail operations constituted a separate “grade or class” from deputy sheriffs assigned to patrol and ordered OCERS to include the 6FE overtime in their pension calculations.
The California Court of Appeal affirmed. It held that substantial evidence supported treating the deputy sheriffs who worked in jail operations as distinct grade or class under Government Code section 31461 because of meaningful differences in their duties, schedules, recruitment requirements, and work locations. The fact that the County’s MOUs did not formally designate jail deputies as a separate grade or class was not dispositive.
Because the half-hour of overtime was built into the regular schedule and ordinarily worked by the deputies who worked in the jail, the Court concluded that the 6FE overtime constituted “compensation earnable” and had to be included in the deputies’ retirement benefit calculations.
Szewczyk v. Orange County Employees Retirement System, G065386 (Cal. Ct. App. 2026)