DA uses personal check to pay law firm after county refuses to foot the bill

After the San Luis Obispo County Board of Supervisors voted to deny payment to a law firm hired by District Attorney Dan Dow to review a longstanding practice giving prosecutors days off in exchange for on-call time, Dow paid the $2,874 bill out of his own pocket.

The move ends a back-and-forth between the DA and the county since a whistleblower complaint revealed the office’s prosecutors enjoyed a generous perk that was never included in their union labor agreement. According to Dow, the practice over whether prosecutors could receive nine days off in exchange for two weeks of on-call duty was more than 30 years old.

After a closed session with the Board of Supervisors and County Counsel, Dow immediately stopped the practice, but hired Jones & Mayer law firm in Fullerton to weigh in on the issue without approval from the board. On Jan. 5, despite county auditor Jim Erb’s recommendation that the county pay the firm, supervisors voted 4-1 to deny the request, leaving the matter unsolved.

“Although I firmly believe the board should have followed the Auditor’s recommendation to pay the bill, in the interest of moving forward, my wife and I paid the full amount owed from our family checkbook within a few days after the board voted to deny the payment,” Dow wrote in an email to The Tribune on Wednesday. “I consider the matter closed.”

This story was originally published January 27, 2016 at 6:03 PM with the headline "DA uses personal check to pay law firm after county refuses to foot the bill."