Ashley K. Dunning

San Francisco

Public Pensions

For the past few years, Ashley K. Dunning has dealt with the rippling aftershocks of the California Supreme Court's landmark pension decision of 2020. In Alameda County Deputy Sheriffs' Association v. Alameda County Employees' Retirement Association (Alameda), Dunning prevailed on behalf of her client, the Merced County Employees' Retirement Association. Despite claims that the retirement systems had violated members' constitutionally vested rights, the court upheld the statutory limitations enforced by the retirement systems.

Seeking to close a variety of loopholes, the court ruled that some compensation -- like pay for being on standby-- could no longer be counted towards an employee's pension after the legislature changed the applicable pension statutes in 2013. As county retirement systems began implementing the pension reform statutes, many Californians who retired after January 1, 2013 received retirement benefits that were lower than they had expected.

They were displeased, to say the least.

As co-chair of the Pensions, Benefits & Investments Group at Nossaman LLP in San Francisco, Dunning has stayed extremely busy serving as fiduciary and litigation counsel to the majority of the California retirement systems governed by the County Employees Retirement Law of 1937 (CERL), to the California Public Employees Retirement System (CalPERS), and to the city retirement systems in Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco and Fresno.

Over the past year, for example, she led Nossaman teams that secured victories on behalf of CERL systems, the Sacramento County Employees' Retirement System and its Board of Retirement, and on behalf of the Ventura County Employees' Retirement Association (VCERA), regarding their implementation of Alameda. She also represented the San Bernardino County Employees' Retirement Association in over a dozen successful administrative adjudications regarding similar issues of Alameda implementation. In addition, Dunning successfully represented CalPERS in another pension benefit challenge. The cases involving VCERA and CalPERS have both been appealed. Another case, in which she represents Alameda County Employees' Retirement Association against Alameda Health System, is also on appeal, with oral argument expected this year.

"I've had the honor of representing a number of the retirement systems in more than a dozen administrative adjudications and in three writ actions defending the proper implementation of the Alameda decision and pension reform legislation and regulations," Dunning said. "In these proceedings, both superior courts and hearing officers have uniformly upheld the retirement board's implementation of the rules that apply to them."

"People criticize pensions all the time," she continued, "but the idea is they're supposed to give people a guaranteed life income that keeps them at a certain level of an ability to live properly within means that are roughly similar and not higher than what they had when they were working ... not more or less than they should be paid under the statutory formulas."

--Kathryn Stelmach Artuso