“Victims are due their justice, their due diligence and all their protections,” said Moore. “But I am tasked with protecting and serving our students of today, and they deserve everything we have and more. And when we’re taking our limited resources away from them and their future, then I see injustice at a very large scale.”
The 2019 law — known as AB 218 — was passed because many victims of horrific abuse had never been compensated for the long term harm they suffered. The law was a product of a growing awareness that the nature of sexual abuse leads many victims to block out their trauma until years later. In one case that emerged after the law was passed, a jury found that Moreno Valley Unified School District, south of Los Angeles, had hired a teacher and kept him on staff for two decades despite a long history of complaints that he had molested other students.
Now, though, offering some measure of justice for those crimes is creating a fiscal crisis that is rippling through local government agencies – and the clients they serve. Some government agencies are going to the bond market or taking out loans to pay for the settlements, though many are dipping into savings. The lucky ones have insurance coverage. But the dollar values involved are so large that the settlements are now imperiling the public insurance programs that schools and counties rely on to protect themselves against future unexpected costs.
California isn’t the only place where public agencies are dealing with this Catch 22. Since 2017, at least 33 states have raised the statute-of-limitations on abuse cases. But unlike California, most other states cap damages against public entities, limiting their liability. This piles onto the other fiscal burdens on government agencies in the state as they deal with wildfires, pension obligations, declining enrollments and the federal immigration crackdown.
The extent of the costs became clear last year when Los Angeles County struck two settlements with thousands of victims for almost $5 billion — the first of which was the largest ever involving sexual assault claims against a public entity. Most of them are related to a physical and sexual abuse in the county’s juvenile detention and foster care programs.
The county cited the settlements – along with the costs of recent wildfires – when it cut its budget by 3% last year, making reductions to several departments. Officials also plan to tap the bond market to cover some of the costs of the settlement, with long term knock on effects for the country.
