A state appeals panel has rejected an effort from a Contra Costa school district and other California public schools to overturn a state law allowing people making allegations of sexual abuse to sue over decades-old claims, which public school representatives say could expose school districts to devastating lawsuits threatening their ability to remain financially solvent.
The California First District Court of Appeal filed its decision July 31. Justice Mark Simons wrote the opinion; Justices Teri Jackson and Gordon Burns concurred.
California lawmakers enacted Assembly Bill 218 in 2019, opening a three-year window for people to file sexual abuse lawsuits against public entities that had otherwise been barred under existing statutory limitations. The lawsuit in question involves a plaintiff, identified as A.M.M., who sued West Contra Costa Unified School District in December 2022 concerning allegations a Richmond High School counselor assaulted her from 1979 through 1983, starting when she was 14.
In response, the district sought dismissal on several fronts, including the argument that reviving such a claim would violate the state constitution’s “gift of public funds” clause. Contra Costa County Judge John Devine refused to dismiss the lawsuit on those grounds, prompting the district to seek writ review before the appellate panel. At that phase, the district also argued the law violates state and federal due process protections, while the panel accepted a dozen briefs from interested parties supporting both sides.
The district’s arguments invoked the 1963 Government Claims Act and subsequent amendments, noting that during the time frame of the alleged acts, plaintiffs were required to present claims to public entities within 100 days before taking the issue to court. That clause was removed for claims on or after Jan. 1, 2009, through separate action, but the district argued AB 218 retroactively waived the requirement and violated a clause denying “to the legislature the right to make direct appropriations to individuals from general considerations of charity or gratitude, or because of some supposed moral obligation resting upon the people of the state.”
“Waiver of the claim presentation requirement did not constitute an expenditure of public funds that may be considered a ‘gift’ because AB 218 did not create new ‘substantive liability’ for the underlying alleged wrongful conduct,” Simons wrote. “Instead, AB 218 simply waived a condition the state had imposed on its consent to suit.”
The panel relied on an 1894 lawsuit, Chapman v. State, in which a plaintiff was allowed to sue over coal lost to a wharf collapse under a law passed after the incident. That ruling, Simons wrote, relied on a determination the lawsuit wasn’t creating retroactive liability but only sought to advance a claim the state board of examiners had rejected at a time when plaintiffs had no recourse to continue seeking recovery.
The claims presentation requirement in place during the time of the allegations is not about whether a public body could be found liable for such conduct as the plaintiff claims, only the procedural rules a plaintiff has to follow to seek damages without running into government immunity protections.
The panel agreed there is a difference between a statutory limit on how long a person can wait before suing and the claims presentation requirement forcing a plaintiff to first offer the government body a chance to remedy a situation, but said that distinction is immaterial to the district’s gift clause argument and any public body’s underlying substantive liability.
“When the Legislature waives either requirement, it exposes the public treasury to potential causes of action that were otherwise barred,” Simons wrote. “The gift clause is violated when conduct that was not tortious when it took place is subsequently made tortious with retroactive effect.”
The panel further said lawmakers addressed the public interest of enacting AB 218, including the possible mental health benefits of allowing victims to take their concerns to the justice system, and said “courts have regularly concluded that expenditures on behalf of disadvantaged groups serve a public purpose.” Although the district said people alleging sexual abuse aren’t a “recognizable population,” the panel said the class “is sufficiently defined, even if victims must prove their eligibility for compensation in individual lawsuits.”
Both the districts and several groups filing support briefs argued AB 218 is bad public policy, but the panel said lawmakers already considered such arguments before passing the legislation. Simons quoted an Assembly Judiciary Committee report that “acknowledged opponents’ concerns and the request to retain the claims presentation bar, but observed, ‘Obviously, the flip side of the burden of the cost of these claims on schools, churches and athletic programs that protected sexual abusers of children is the lifetime damage done to those children.’ ”
Although the school district said it wasn’t asking the appellate panel to make policy decisions, Simon said the arguments advanced do exactly that and noted courts aren’t supposed to get involved at that level of lawmaking. Finally, the panel rejected due process arguments, saying those rights belong to individual citizens regarding governmental action and cannot also be accessible to political subdivisions.
The panel denied a petition for writ of mandate and awarded legal costs to the plaintiff.
Representing the school district are Horvitz & Levy and Fagen Friedman & Fulfrost. The district did not respond to a request for comment.
Filing support briefs were Schools Association for Excess Risk, Northern California Regional Liability Excess Fund, Southern California Regional Liability Excess Fund, and Statewide Association of Community Colleges; California School Boards Association and its Education Legal Alliance; Montecito Union School District and Carpinteria Unified School District; Schools Excess Liability Fund, California Association of Joint Powers Authorities and Public Risk Innovations, Solutions and Management; Alliance of Schools for Cooperative Insurance Programs; California Association of School Business Officials; Schools Insurance Authority; Los Angeles County; Compton Unified School District; and East Side Union High School District, San Mateo Union High School District, Santa Clara Unified School District, Oakland Unified School District, Los Gatos-Saratoga Union High School District, Oak Grove School District and Berryessa Union School District.
Representing the plaintiff were the firms Boucher LLP and Esner, Chang, Boyer & Murphy.
Briefs supporting the plaintiff came from Consumer Attorneys of California; and Public Justice, Child USA, Equal Rights Advocates and National Center for Victims of Crime.
Troy Flint, chief communications officer for the California School Boards Association, issued a statement on the ruling:
“The Legislature’s passage of Assembly Bill 218 in 2019 marked a significant and, for some local educational agencies (LEAs), existential increase in financial exposure that threatens them with insolvency or even bankruptcy. AB 218 created a three-year ‘lookback period’ — from Jan. 1, 2020, to Dec. 31, 2022 — in which claims for childhood sexual assault were no longer subject to any statute of limitations or the claims-presentation requirements of the Government Claims Act. While unquestionably well-intentioned as a way to provide a measure of restitution to victims of unconscionable crimes, the structure of AB 218 creates significant externalities and unintended consequences that challenge the financial health of schools, the ability to properly validate claims, and the resources needed to support current students.
“As a result of AB 218, LEAs were suddenly exposed to lawsuits based on incidents of childhood sexual assault alleged to have occurred decades before. Allegations that old are extremely difficult to defend, since key witnesses and evidence are often unavailable. And, successful or not, litigating such allegations is expensive, and, in many cases, has to be funded directly by LEAs due to the unavailability of insurance for claims of distant vintage. Many LEAs have chosen to challenge these lawsuits based on the constitutionality of AB 218. In doing so, those LEAs typically argued that, by waiving the GCA’s claims-presentation requirements, AB 218 created an unconstitutional ‘gift of public funds.’ Among other circumstances, an unconstitutional gift of public funds occurs when the Legislature creates a new, retroactive liability for public agencies.
“Prior to AB 218, the GCA required all victims of childhood sexual assault to file a timely claim with the appropriate LEA before the victims can file a suit for damages. Victims that did not timely file a claim were permanently barred from ever filing a suit. LEAs challenging AB 218 have argued that, by removing this claims-presentation requirement, AB 218 effectively created a new, retroactive liability since, before its passage, LEAs could not have been sued by assault victims who failed to comply with the GCA. This argument has had some success at the trial court level. For example, a trial court in Merced County recently agreed that AB 218 made an unconstitutional gift of public funds, a decision that is now being reviewed by the Fifth District Court of Appeals.
“However, success has not been universal. In the first appellate decision on AB 218’s ‘gift of public funds’ issue, the court in West Contra Costa Unified School District v. Superior Court found that AB 218 did not constitute an impermissible gift. The First District Court of Appeal found that:
- Although eliminating the claims-presentation requirement meant LEAs could be sued for previously barred claims, this did not qualify as a new ‘liability,’ since the ‘liability’ at issue — childhood sexual assault — existed well before AB 218’s passage and was unaffected by the GCA. As a result, AB 218 was not a ‘gift’ of any public funds.
- Even if eliminating the GCA’s claims-presentation requirement was a gift, the gift would not have been unconstitutional because it served a valid public purpose. Specifically, the court felt that AB 218 benefitted the public welfare by providing relief to victims of childhood sexual assault. In making this determination, the court was required to, and did, give heavy deference to the legislative intent as reflected in the legislative history of the bill that AB 218 was of public benefit. As part of this analysis, the court was unpersuaded by any of the policy concerns emphasized by CSBA’s Education Legal Alliance and other organizations that filed amicus briefs, since those same policy concerns had already been considered and rejected by the Legislature during the legislative process.
- Finally, the court found that, as political subdivision of the state, the district did not have standing to raise various due process arguments under the federal and California constitutions.