Dallas' $235 million police-and-fire back pay lawsuit settlements were made much easier because of a single line in the lengthy bill that saved the city's first-responder pension system from disaster.

The new law states that "eligible back pay" for pension contributions and benefits "does not include any additional compensation paid by the city to a member or pensioner wholly or partly or directly or indirectly as the result of litigation instituted to recover back pay."

That sentence — a compromise from what the city initially wanted — prevents police and firefighters from claiming the Dallas Police and Fire Pension System owes them more in benefits. And it halts what would've been the consequence of those additional benefits: the retirement fund's claims for pension contributions owed on back pay from the city and those same police and firefighters.

City Attorney Larry Casto said the language was important to the settlements and the pension bill. The sentence also helped "the number crunchers" make sure the pension rescue plan worked, he said.

"We needed to add certainty," Casto said. "And that sentence facilitated us coming to an accord on the pension legislation."

Casto said if the city had to pay tens of millions more to the pension, the settlement of the decades-old suits announced Tuesday — the payment of which is tied to the city's available bonding capacity — probably wasn't possible.

The end result of the bill might not look pretty to taxpayers. The city will pay out $61.7 million for plaintiffs in Collin County cases, $173.3 million for the Rockwall County class-action suits and tens of millions more in pension contributions every year.

But the risks were great. Mayor Mike Rawlings had called the lawsuits and the pension's troubles part of a dark cloud that loomed over the city's finances and could push Dallas into bankruptcy. Losing the lawsuits would've meant multi-billion-dollar judgments. The pension system was on track to go broke within 10 years. And the police and fire departments were shrinking as people quit amid the uncertainty.

The plaintiffs also had a major risk: They could have lost in court and walked away with nothing after more than two decades of litigation.

Casto said the settlement was "the best deal all around that we could achieve for all the parties."

"It's a good day for the firefighters, it's a good day for the police officers, and it's a good day for the taxpayers," he said.

Pension leaders had attached the system to the pay lawsuits as a third party because they wanted to make sure the fund wasn't doomed by a potential judgment that declared the city should have forever followed the language of a 1979 pay referendum.

"Throughout the whole time of this lawsuit, we were agnostic, as long as we were made whole," said Josh Mond, the pension system's general counsel.

Mond wasn't sure that police and firefighters could legally have claimed they were owed pension benefits if they had agreed to settle the claim. And those calculations would have been extraordinarily difficult at the very least.

But pension leaders had been concerned enough to push for language to ensure the system got its money if it had to pay larger benefits.

Had the pension system been on the hook to pay the benefits, Executive Director Kelly Gottschalk said it "would've been devastating to the pension plan" and would have "probably bankrupted the pension fund."

The city had hoped to kill the lawsuits with the bill. But their bid for legal immunity language went nowhere.

City leaders had also asked legislators late in the negotiations if they could bump up the sales tax temporarily to help settle the lawsuits, but they were told a tax increase was a non-starter.

After the bill became law, the city late last year agreed to settle the four Collin County pay lawsuits for a total cost of $61.7 million. The pension system had already removed itself from those cases.

The system remains as a party in the Rockwall County cases, but that's only because the cases were on appeal. Removing the system is only one of the hurdles left for the class-action lawsuits to clear before the settlement is officially a done deal. The parties also still need to determine how the settlement will be administered and account for all the nearly 8,700 plaintiffs.

"All that will take several months, but it's all doable," said Bob Gorsky, an attorney for the plaintiffs.

The Dallas City Council is expected to vote on the deal sometime this summer.