AUGUSTA – The Workers’ Compensation Board has let go two hearing officers after a court found their terms expired last Dec. 31.

But their work in the last nine months will likely stand.

Hearing officers are employed by the board to act as judges in disputes between injured employees and insurance companies. Typically at issue: benefits, medical bills and, sometimes, getting old jobs back.

With fewer officers – from nine to seven – cases will take longer to resolve, Executive Director Paul Dionne said. The average time, start to finish, had been seven months.

After the board failed to reappoint hearing officers John McCurry and Heidi Johnson last winter, lawyers for the pair argued the board’s directors would have to reach a majority vote to fire them.

They couldn’t.

So McCurry and Johnson stayed on, and before long, companies began challenging the validity of their decisions. S.D. Warren was the first to file suit.

In a ruling on Sept. 19, the Maine Supreme Court found that Johnson’s decision in the S.D. Warren case would stand, but that a majority vote hadn’t been needed to end her three-year term of employment.

Taking that ruling, the board sent letters to Johnson and McCurry saying that they would only remain on state payroll until Oct. 3, Dionne said.

Right along, employees and employers have been given the option of having their case reassigned when they were given to Johnson or McCurry, he said.

About 60 to 70 percent of people did request someone else hear their case.

The half-business, half-labor board originally split on the reappointment votes over perceptions that Johnson’s rulings favored business too often and McCurry’s decisions favored labor too often.

When the board met Tuesday, Dionne said he presented three options:

• Allow the hearing officers to return on a contract basis to complete the 20 or so cases ready for a decision

• Place personnel within the agencies into those two positions, as acting agents, for six months

• Start the process to advertise the positions immediately

The board considered but didn’t act on any of those.

“There’s still a disagreement as to whether to immediately hire hearing officers, who those hearing officers ought to be,” Dionne said. “It’s still somewhat confrontational.”

There’s a backlog of 400 cases to be dealt with, he added.

Gov. John Baldacci had given the often-deadlock board a list of items on which to reach consensus this past spring. Dealing with the hearing officers – and setting up criteria to evaluate their employment – was one of them. That completion date, Aug. 1, has been missed.

The deadline for another item – dealing with the contentious issue of extending benefits to injured workers and determining just how injured someone has to be to receive long-term benefits – was Oct. 1. That was missed as well.

Two other cases in Superior Court also questioning the hearing officers’ authority will likely be dismissed, Tim Collier, the board’s assistant general counsel said. One other lawsuit may still go forward.

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