Three weeks after a stunning verdict in a harassment lawsuit against Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer, Orange County supervisors told him Tuesday that they want him out of the way in a survey of employees.
Spitzer hired a law firm to conduct a top-down review of the office’s reporting process for employees who feel harassed, but the supervisors said they would rather the county’s director of Human Resources Services do the review. Spitzer said he had no problem with that.
“Certainly the goal is that the employees feel safe about reporting” harassment, Spitzer told the supervisors at their board meeting Tuesday.
A jury in San Diego earlier this month found that former high-ranking Orange County prosecutor Tracy Miller was forced to retire due to harassment when she tried to blow the whistle on sexual harassment from another high-ranking executive, Gary LoGalbo, who has since died.
Lawsuits regarding LoGalbo’s alleged sexual and racial harassment are awaiting trial.
The jury awarded Miller $3 million in economic damages and awarded $25,000 to Miller in punitive damages from Spitzer.
Spitzer argued that LoGalbo’s harassment was not reported right away in the North Justice Center where he worked.
“It was not reported what was going on in north court,” Spitzer said. “We didn’t know until there was a termination. That was really disturbing to me and that has to be rectified.”
Spitzer said he reached out to the employee unions to see if employees would cooperate with his law firm’s review “and they all agreed they’d be willing to cooperate.”
But Spitzer added, “I certainly don’t want to duplicate inquiries” by the county’s Human Resources Services department, he said.
Spitzer said his goal was to “ensure that everybody feels if there is alleged misconduct that they have a safe place to go and trust and make a report that will be followed through and that will be unbiased and they will have an opportunity to be heard…”
Orange County Board Vice Chairwoman Katrina Foley said, “I appreciate the effort, but what I would like to request…. is that your office not be involved in the survey. I don’t think we’d be able to get honest feedback from people.”
Foley added, “We need an outside entity to conduct the survey.”
Spitzer has resisted suggestions in the past of folding his human resources department into the county’s overall Human Resources Services department. But he said that while he would like to keep an HR department in his office he would not object to having it report to the county’s department.