Mayor: OCSD meeting illegal

Paul Clinton

The Orange County Sanitation District’s 25-member board has come

under fire from one of its own members for a meeting held last week

that may have violated the state’s open-meeting laws.

Mayor Debbie Cook stormed out of the meeting, held at the

district’s Fountain Valley offices on Sept. 26, and later criticized

it as illegal.

Cook, an attorney who specialized in environmental law before she

was elected to the City Council in 2000, said the district

inappropriately discussed a public issue by shielding itself with an

exception in state law that allows agencies to discuss legal strategy

behind closed doors.

“It was absolutely illegal,” Cook said. “They were trying to keep

the public out.”

District spokeswoman Lisa Murphy insisted that the meeting was not

improper. Tom Woodruff, the agency’s attorney, opined that it would

not violate state law, Murphy said.

“We believe that the meeting was a legitimate closed-session

meeting,” Murphy said. “The district called the meeting because of

potential litigation.”

During a closed-door session at the regularly scheduled meeting,

the district’s appointed board members held discussions with

representatives from the Environmental Protection Agency and the

Santa Ana Regional Water Quality Control Board.

As the district moves to a higher level of treatment for the 234

million gallons of waste water it releases into the ocean each day,

officials there are worried about the possibility that the EPA would

file a lawsuit and levy harsh fines of up to $25,000 a day.

Since the mid-1980s, the district has been allowed to unload

moderately treated sewage into the ocean because it had been granted

a special waiver by the EPA. The waiver gave the agency, in essence,

an exemption to the Clean Water Act of 1972.

Even though the agency voted July 17 to drop the waiver and step

up its treatment levels, the EPA would be legally required to bring a

suit, said board member Jim Ferryman, a board member and trustee in

the Newport Mesa Unified School District.

“The minute we don’t comply with the waiver, they have to sue us,”

Ferryman said.

To avert that suit, the board has been negotiating with the EPA. A

week ago, district officials pitched the idea of filing a preemptive

lawsuit, then asking a judge to sign a consent decree, which would

allow the district to work toward full treatment without the fines.

District engineers have estimated that 100% of the waste water

could be fully treated by 2013.

The state’s Brown Act, passed in 1953, requires public agencies to

conduct business in public and provide detailed agendas of those

discussions. Private meetings can cover personnel issues, property

negotiations or “pending litigation.”

However, even though agency leaders believe they are headed for a

lawsuit with the EPA, Brown Act author Terry Francke, an attorney

with the California First Amendment Coalition, said he agreed with

Cook.

Francke said the meeting was illegal because the district invited

the EPA, the potential legal combatant.

“Think of it as a football huddle,” Francke said. “You have to

huddle to prevent the other team from finding out what play you’re

going to run. You wouldn’t have a huddle with the other team.”