Sviridov v. City of San Diego, 2017 WL 3493855 (Cal. Ct. App. 2017)
Aleksei Sviridov, a former police officer for the City of San Diego, was terminated from his job in 2007, reinstated in 2008 and then failed to return to work thereafter, which resulted in a second termination. Following years of litigation and three prior appeals, the case was remanded to the trial court with directions to enter judgment in favor of the City and to award the City its costs on appeal. The City filed a memorandum of costs in which it sought $90,378. Sviridov moved to strike the City’s cost bill on the ground that the City could not recover its costs against an unsuccessful plaintiff under the Fair Employment and Housing Act (“FEHA”) “unless the plaintiff brought or continued litigating the action without an objective basis for believing it had potential merit,” citing Williams v. Chino Valley Indep’t Fire Dist., 61 Cal. 4th 97 (2015). The City provided evidence that it had served Sviridov with three separate statutory settlement offers under Cal. Code Civ. Proc. § 998 (all rejected by Sviridov) in which it offered to waive costs in exchange for a dismissal of the action. The trial court determined that Williams did not apply because the only claim to survive to trial was a claim under the Public Safety Officers Procedural Bill of Rights Act, which statute does not bar recovery of ordinary costs by a prevailing party. The Court of Appeal affirmed, holding that “a blanket application of Williams to preclude section 998 costs unless the FEHA claim was objectively groundless would erode the public policy of encouraging settlement in such cases.”