SAN JOSE — With mounting pressure to settle union lawsuits over divisive pension reforms, Mayor Sam Liccardo tried to spur talks in February by offering to give up half the additional cuts the city hoped to ultimately win in court.

But a new analysis by this newspaper shows city leaders ultimately gave up all those additional cuts — worth some $49 million a year — and more in the settlement with police and firefighters they announced with great fanfare earlier this month. Details released since the initial announcement show significant givebacks to retirees and new hires that were not initially revealed.

Still, it may have been the best city leaders could do. Faced with an increasingly unfavorable legal outlook and an exodus of cops and other workers, city leaders acknowledge they struggled to reach an accord that preserves the roughly $25 million in annual retirement savings they gained when voters overwhelmingly passed the Measure B pension reforms three years ago.

“We didn’t get everything I wanted or that the council wanted,” Liccardo said. “But we met our key objectives.”

But whether the city could have achieved that same, lower level of savings without three years of backbiting and bad blood with its own employees may be argued over for years to come.

Approved by nearly 70 percent of city voters over union objections in June 2012, Measure B reduced pensions for new hires, eliminated extra “bonus” checks to retirees from the city’s underfunded pension plans, made it harder to qualify for disability retirement and called for veteran workers to either pay a lot more for their pensions or choose a reduced benefit.

City unions immediately sued to overturn the measure. A judge in 2013 blocked the higher pension contributions from city workers — the most controversial and valuable of the measure’s provisions — citing state legal precedents effectively forbidding changes to government employees’ retirement benefits after they’re hired.

While both sides threatened appeals, the city saw cops, wastewater technicians, planners and other workers bolt for better compensation elsewhere, leaving several departments in a staffing crisis and amplifying critics’ calls to end the legal battle.

The city hopes it did so with the settlement announced July 15. The firefighters ratified the proposed settlement, but it still needs ratification from the police union and City Council approval. The city next month will push for similar agreements with the city’s other unions.

Among the proposed settlement’s changes:

Current employees: The settlement abandons nearly $50 million in court-blocked annual savings from having workers hired before Measure B pay more for their pensions or choose a smaller benefit.

New hires: The settlement increases the pension benefit for newly hired city workers to align with those in the state retirement system under changes the Legislature adopted after Measure B. New cops and firefighters will have a lower retirement age and higher maximum pension of 80 percent of pay than Measure B allowed. But city officials note the state system has no maximum pension cap, and say the settlement keeps key Measure B provisions: forbidding retroactive pension increases that create massive debt in the retirement system, and an agreement to split the full cost of the benefit with the city. Liccardo said it keeps about 80 percent of Measure B’s new-hire pension savings.

Retiree bonus checks: The settlement maintains elimination of these but substitutes a more limited benefit for veteran workers and retirees that would guarantee their pensions keep 75 percent of their “purchasing power.” City officials say only about 55 older police and fire retirees would qualify, and that its added costs are about 5 percent of the original bonus check tab. A court ruling this year blocking San Francisco’s elimination of bonus checks left San Jose officials uneasy about their chances of eliminating them entirely.

Retiree health care: One of the city’s biggest retirement bill savings came not from Measure B but an administrative change in the medical plan offerings that reduced health benefits for retirees. Under the proposed settlement, new hires would no longer be promised full premium coverage in retirement for the cheapest health plan offered city workers. Instead, they would pay into a retirement health savings plan with no city contribution. Veteran employees and retirees would have the option of switching to that savings plan. Otherwise, the city would tie the value of their retirement health benefit to the “silver” plan under President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act. City officials said eliminating the defined retirement health benefit will yield substantial savings not only for the city but employees, who saw big paycheck deductions for costs of the deeply underfunded plan.

Disability: The proposed settlement reverses Measure B provisions that required injured workers to take other city jobs if they could, but retains having an independent medical expert panel make disability determinations.