The Orange County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday told the district attorney and sheriff to estimate how much it will cost to implement an outside legal committee’s reform recommendations in the wake of the county’s jailhouse informant controversy.

The board’s resolution also directs District Attorney Tony Rackauckas and Sheriff Sandra Hutchens to explain if they reject any recommendations and to avoid purging any records related to confidential informants.

After a public discussion, supervisors met in closed session with Rackauckas before Chairman Todd Spitzer emerged to announce directives issued to the county’s top law enforcement leaders.

Rackauckas later accused Spitzer of mischaracterizing the discussion during Tuesday’s private meeting; officials cited a possible federal investigation as the reason for the closed session.

Rackauckas said he already planned to issue a written response to the committee report – issued Jan. 4 by an outside committee of legal experts he invited to review his office’s use of jail informants. Rackauckas also noted that his office had enacted many of the suggested changes even before the report came out.

“This is kind of like an attempt to indicate he’s in charge,” Rackauckas told the Register. “Having a discussion and talking about what our intentions are is one thing. To have him turn that into a claim that he directed us to do all three things is quite another.”

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Spitzer in response said the board didn’t discuss or ask Rackauckas’ permission about anything. He said the only thing Rackauckas discussed with supervisors was the written report.

Despite the board’s resolution directing the DA and the sheriff to take or not take certain actions, Spitzer said: “We didn’t order him to do anything. We asked cooperatively. The whole point here is not that we’re ordering him to do it, it’s that the board is engaged in this discussion.”

The Board of Supervisors sets the budget for the District Attorney’s Office and Sheriff’s Department. Rackauckas and Hutchens, however, are elected officials.

The supervisors took up the issue of jail informants after the committee of legal experts declared the D.A.’s Office a “rudderless” ship and called for a deeper investigation into the use of jailhouse informants. Rackauckas responded by requesting a formal investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice.

Supervisors agreed Tuesday to suspend the regular schedules that allow for county documents to be destroyed, unless the department seeking to destroy the records obtains permission from county lawyers, the county CEO or Human Resources.

Supervisors also want to assure “all county employees that they are encouraged to cooperate fully and not be concerned about any adverse employment actions,” said Spitzer, a former Orange County prosecutor. Rackauckas fired him from the office in 2010.

Rackauckas’ chief of staff, Susan Kang Schroeder, said the office will comply with the board’s requests. She said D.A. officials already have briefed supervisors on the jailhouse informant issue in an earlier meeting and are happy to answer more questions.

“We’ve always been,” she said.

Committee chairman Robert Gerard, former president of the Orange County Bar Association, said at Tuesday’s meeting that he knows “for a fact” that the District Attorney’s Office already has started implementing some of the recommendations. Those include establishing a confidential informant review committee, revamping the staff training program and assigning two deputy district attorneys to examine past convictions “from a conviction integrity perspective,” Gerard said.

The scandal, which has gained national attention and earned rebukes from prominent criminal justice experts, emerged through the case of Scott Dekraai, who murdered his ex-wife and seven other people in a Seal Beach salon in 2011.

A judge last year removed the District Attorney’s Office from the death penalty prosecution, ruling that the office had failed to supervise staff who withheld evidence and broke rules regarding the use of jailhouse informants. The judge also concluded that two sheriff’s deputies either intentionally lied or willfully withheld material evidence during two court hearings.

The state Attorney General’s Office has appealed the ruling.

Gerard also emphasized that the committee’s recommendation for a deeper investigation “should not be interpreted to mean that we have any conclusion whatsoever that an investigation by a body with subpoena power would reach a different result than in our evaluation.”

“The answer to that is we just, we don’t know,” said Gerard, who is a partner in the Irvine law firm Friedman, Stroffe & Gerard. “But again we have no reason to believe that there’d be a different conclusion.”

Contact the writer: mcuniff@ocregister.com or 949-492-5122. Twitter: @meghanncuniff.