Water Board Fight Spills Into All of Las Virgenes

James E. Colbaugh got a jolt when he went to court last year to defend his employers at Small Claims Court.

One of the employers was there--waiting to testify against Colbaugh.

Colbaugh is director of operations for the Las Virgenes Municipal Water District, which was fighting a $1,208 damage claim arising from a car’s striking a fire-hydrant valve cover. Such valves, resembling small manhole covers, are in the street close to the fire hydrants.

The man standing in front of the judge with sketches and diagrams showing how the water district was at fault was Tad Mattock, the maverick member of the water district’s five-member governing board of directors.

The scene was unusual, even for Small Claims Court, where oddball suits and offbeat arguments are the norm.

“The judge had a hard time trying to understand why Las Virgenes was against Las Virgenes,” Colbaugh said.

Dispute Illustrated

But the unusual courtroom confrontation illustrates how a personality dispute among water district officials has spilled out of the board room and splashed sloppily across the Las Virgenes area.

The hostility reached a peak last week when district directors took their feud to Los Angeles County officials--who reacted by disqualifying half the candidates in this fall’s water board election and canceling two of the three board races.

As a result, portions of Agoura, Calabasas and Agoura Hills for the next four years will be represented on the water board by appointees selected by the county Board of Supervisors instead of by local voters.

That’s no small matter for the booming Las Virgenes district, where water board members have the power to control growth by regulating placement of water and sewer lines and allocation of water and sanitation services.

Nor is the nasty public squabbling a minor matter to Las Virgenes administrators, who have literally spent millions of dollars in the past five years to repair their agency’s public image.

Pivotal Figure

Pivotal in the controversy is Mattock, a 71-year-old retired aerospace tool designer and standards writer who lives in a rural area of Calabasas. Mattock was elected to the water board in 1982, at a low point in the water district’s relations with the public.

At the time, the district was under fire from environmentalists, Malibu residents and state water quality officials because of frequent sewage spills at its Tapia Sewage Treatment Plant at the upper end of Malibu Canyon.

The district was also caught in a tug of war between Agoura and Calabasas homeowners anxious to control growth by limiting new hookups for sewers and water, and developers who were taking out construction permits as fast as they could.

Mattock campaigned as a no-nonsense, reform-minded candidate. He pledged to help steer the water district away from any action that would reinforce its reputation as a clumsy, out-of-control bureaucracy caught up in land-use disputes. He defeated opponent Glen Peterson by 39 votes.

Mattock’s stance at once irritated district administrators and directors who had already set out to modernize Las Virgenes’ operations.

They had begun recruiting specialists to help run the rapidly expanding district and were planning a computer system that would streamline their billing and engineering operations. More significantly, they had embarked on a $55-million upgrading project at their beleaguered Tapia Sewage Plant.

The renovations included equipment to guard against spills of raw sewage and a sophisticated tertiary filtration system designed to cleanse treated effluent sometimes dumped into Malibu Canyon Creek.

A network of pipes to pump effluent from the Tapia plant to Agoura Hills and Westlake Village, where the waste water could be used to cheaply irrigate greenbelts, parkland and golf courses, had also been started.

Directors’ Perks Attacked

Mattock further angered the board of directors by making an issue of the $100 payments each director receives for attending board meetings and for outside seminars and conferences.

“I think as directors we should be protectors of the public purse,” Mattock said shortly after taking office. He suggested that some of his colleagues were doing needless junketeering.

Like many of Mattock’s subsequent complaints and suggestions, that one fell on deaf ears. Last year, one Las Virgenes director was paid $6,838 for going to meetings; this year, the board budgeted itself $43,500 for fees.

After two years on the losing side of frequent 4-1 board votes, Mattock did something unforgivable in the eyes of his Las Virgenes colleagues: He openly campaigned for a candidate trying to unseat 18-year-veteran George Long of Westlake Village.

The 1984 campaign reached a low point when Mattock accused Long of trying to run him down in a Westlake Village supermarket parking lot as he handed out leaflets for Long’s challenger. Long angrily denied the charge.

Board relations have not improved since then.

Mattock has complained repeatedly this year about the $80,000-per-year salary paid to Richard Baird, water district general manager.

In June, Mattock refused to vote on Las Virgenes’ $7.4-million 1986-87 budget because he objected to the promotion of a Baird aide to a new managerial position.

“I’m ‘Minority Mattock,’ I know,” he grumbled at another board meeting earlier this year. “I’ll never get my thoughts put over.”

Mattock had hoped to change that during the upcoming Nov. 4 election by unseating incumbents Harold Helsley and Ann Dorgelo, who represent district divisions in Calabasas and Agoura Hills.

He recruited two challengers to oppose them--and sparked the present election controversy by improperly collecting nominating-petition signatures for the pair.

Candidates Disqualified

Challengers Kurt Moore and Gordon Miner were disqualified as candidates after Dorgelo and Helsley informed county elections officials that Mattock illegally solicited signatures outside his own political division.

Then Helsley also was disqualified after Miner complained to the county about irregularities with signatures on Helsley’s petition.

When other board members mentioned Mattock’s interference with directors’ reelection campaigns during a special board meeting last week, Mattock jokingly announced that he was considering moving to Westlake Village so he could run against Long two years from now.

Long, who sat next to Mattock but kept his back to him throughout the meeting, was quick to reply.

“We’ve got leash laws in Westlake,” Long said.

Mattock has denied what he calls “devious intentions” in his assistance to Miner and Moore. Less charitably, he says his board colleagues “have served them up on a silver platter.” Mattock accused the district’s administrators of assisting Long in the 1984 election and Helsley in this year’s election.

“Politics should be exercised out there in the streets, Mr. Baird, not here in management’s office,” he told General Manager Baird during last week’s meeting.

Mattock charged that Long “practically had his political headquarters in the general manager’s office” during his 1984 reelection campaign. He also accused Baird and other staff members of “prompting” Helsley to file for reelection on time this year and then aiding Helsley in investigating his opponent, Miner.

“The new candidates’ nomination papers were scrutinized to find ways to disqualify them for fear that the board’s status quo would be altered, threatening someone’s perks, attorney-retainer fees and the general manager’s very high salary,” he said.

“All of this is in the area of possible misconduct and misuse of public funds. This must cease,” Mattock said.

When water district lawyer Wayne Lemieux denied the charges, Mattock replied: “I hope I’m sued. Then I can subpoena people.”

Baird has declined to comment either on Mattock’s accusations or on board work. As for the election cancellations, Baird said: “I don’t want to say embarrassing, but it’s disappointing.”

Views Differ

Other water district staff members said they have mixed feelings about Mattock’s role as a Las Virgenes director.

Some give him high marks for innovative ideas, such as using surplus Tapia plant sludge as a cheap building material for a much-needed sound wall along the Ventura Freeway near Agoura Hills’ Lake Lindero area, and using treated waste water to create a combination recreational lake and irrigation water reservoir in the Santa Monica Mountains.

But other district workers privately criticize Mattock for such ideas as an expensive cleanup of land around an isolated water tank, the elaborate redesign of a pipe system along a scenic Las Virgenes Road creek bed and the costly painting of a temporary pipeline.

Some say they are shocked by Mattock’s proposal for a private audit of management to determine whether a private water company should replace the public Las Virgenes agency as a way of cutting overhead and reducing water costs.

“I think Tad has been very ineffective and divisive,” said Peterson, the 36-year-old Agoura realtor who lost to Mattock in the close 1982 vote. Peterson is challenging him again in the lone water board election still scheduled for November.

“He’s caused a whole lot of headlines and very few solutions for the water district. He for a long time has lost the ear of the board. He creates issues that don’t exist and then wonders why people don’t vote the way he does.”

Staunch Supporter

One person who disagrees, however, is Agoura Hills cabinetmaker Stephen J. McEntee.

McEntee is the man who took the Las Virgenes district to Small Claims Court after the board refused his claim for repairs to his car that he said was damaged by the fire hydrant cover.

At Small Claims Court in August, 1985, Mattock’s testimony helped win McEntee a $333 judgment against the district to cover the deductible amount from his own car insurance.

Mattock was the only board member to support McEntee when board members voted 4-1 to deny his claim for reimbursement.

“Mr. Mattock was the only one who actually acted like he wanted to do something for the people,” McEntee recalled. “The rest of the water board treated me like they were kings, and I was a peasant.

“They acted like Mr. Mattock was a freak amongst them.”