Fired Madera County Sheriff’s Deputies Return to Work

Madera County sheriff’s deputies who were fired after walking off the job 28 days ago began returning to work Wednesday afternoon but their job status remained in doubt.

“We got a lot of the things that we wanted,” Madera County Deputy Sheriff’s Assn. spokesman Domingo Camit said. “The county has agreed to meet our three main demands.”

“But the issue of job status is still being negotiated,” said Ian McAndrew, another spokesman for the association.

Madera County Sheriff Ovonual Berkley explained that the Board of County Supervisors agreed to deputies’ demands for:

- A third-party mediator to aid in contract negotiations. (Madera deputies have been working without a contract for more than two years.)

- A survey of deputies’ wages and benefits in other counties of comparable size. The deputies’ current salaries range from $1,600 to $1,950 a month.

- No more reductions in the number of deputy sheriffs employed by the county. (Eight positions had already been eliminated, and eight more were threatened at the time the strike began.)

Those concessions--the deputies main strike objectives--were offered by supervisors a week ago, Berkley said. But at that time, the supervisors said they would hire the deputies back only as new employees, which would have meant loss of seniority and accrued vacation.

Association officials turned that offer down.

But they now appear to have accepted a similar proposal. According to a “letter of understanding” written by Berkley, deputies who returned to work by 3 p.m. Wednesday would be assigned to their original shifts and locations and would not be subject to job “reprisal” for their participation in the walkout.

They would, however, be reemployed only as “provisional” deputies during a cooling-off period beginning immediately and running until Feb. 15--by which time it was hoped a permanent settlement of their job status would have been negotiated.

Eleven of the 39 striking deputies (two others have been on medical leave throughout the strike) returned to work, as agreed, at the 3 p.m. beginning of their regular shift Wednesday. Berkley said this was “everyone who was supposed to be here; no holdouts,” and Camit said he expects all the other shifts to be fully staffed.

“We’re all ready to go back to work,” Camit said.

Berkley and a skeleton force of undersheriff, captain and three lieutenants have been working 12 hours a day, seven days a week policing the county since the strike began Nov. 6.

A veteran of 26 years with the Sheriff’s Department, Berkley will retire in January. He was defeated in the June election by one of his lieutenants, Glenn Seymour, who openly backed the deputies walkout while working extra shifts to keep law enforcement services operating. “Thank God I will be able to walk away from this mess,” Berkley said.

Seymour, who will inherit the problems, said the opinion in the rural county of 75,000 residents has been “clearly and seriously divided” over the walkout. And some of the bitterness may linger on.

After the Board of Supervisors announced their firing of the strikers, the county’s personnel director began hiring replacements. The association has agreed that two of those newly hired deputies are to remain on the job, working beside the men they were hired to replace.

“They are welcome,” Camit said. “One of the things we wanted was more deputies--not less.”