While the recall campaign against her just hit a signature snag, Alameda County DA Pamela Price is also getting some bad publicity today over some wrongful termination claims from former employees.
It is both a good news day and a bad news day for Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price. As we noted this morning, Alameda County election department officials have declared they’re doing a manual recount of the petition signatures in the recall campaign against her, citing that a sampling of signatures was “not sufficient to determine whether the signature threshold to call for a recall election has been met." That’s certainly not welcome news for the recall campaign.
But the Chronicle has another report about two of Price’s former DA's office employees who filed wrongful termination claims, claiming they were fired for having supported her opponents or political adversaries. One was administrative assistant Maria Ramirez, who’d been an organizer for Price’s 2022 opponent Terry Wiley; the other was program services coordinator Douglas Butler (who was 76 when fired), who claims he was let go because of his age and because he supported Price’s predecessor Nancy O’Malley.
“I’m a single mom with two kids. If I supported Terry, it’s because I got paid for a job I did for him,” Maria Ramirez said to the Chronicle. “It wasn’t fair.”
It’s important to note that neither of these claims seems to have gone anywhere. The Chronicle reports that “Ramirez and Butler each sought more than $25,000 in damages,” but neither has received a penny, and neither case turned into a lawsuit. The claims may have just been leaked to the Chronicle in a recall attempt to create more bad headlines about Price.
And really, isn’t it completely normal for a new DA to fire a bunch of staffers? Here in SF, Chesa Boudin fired a bunch of prosecutors when he took over the local DA’s office, and Brooke Jenkins did the exact same when she took over the office. Though in Boudin’s case, one of those fired employees did win a wrongful termination settlement, so there are circumstances where the fired employees are validated.
According to California's at-will employment law, firings for no cause are only illegal if they are done out of discrimination for a person's age, sex, race, or other protected class, or because of a person's political affiliation — and it seemed to be the latter exception that these two employees were citing.
This might just be a one-day story, unless more dirt gets revealed. But how many days will the recall signature count story last? Probably for the next 30 days, as the Bay Area News Group reports that the manual signature recount “could take another month.”
Image: @AlamedaCountyDA via Twitter
