Board Sued for Hiring School Bond Advisors

Charging that taxpayer money was illegally spent to advocate the passage of an $81-million school bond, the local Libertarian Party on Wednesday sued the Ventura Unified School District.

A lawsuit filed in Ventura County Superior Court claims that the Ventura school board and Supt. Joseph Spirito pledged about $500,000 in public money to hire a San Francisco-based consulting company under the pretense of providing financial advice, said plaintiff’s attorney Robert Chatenever. But the firm, Dale Scott & Co., actually helped promote the successful passage of the June bond, known as Measure M, in violation of state law, the lawsuit contends.

The district, the superintendent and the consulting firm “intentionally concealed the real purpose of the [Dec. 10] contract because each of them knew that the expenditure of public funds to advocate the passage of Measure M would be illegal,” the lawsuit states.

School district officials--who have not yet been served with the lawsuit--adamantly denied the claims. They have 30 days after being served to file a response to the charges.

“We believe that the lawsuit is frivolous,” said Joseph Richards, Ventura Unified’s assistant superintendent for business services. “What we did, in an effort to disseminate information to the members of our community, was expressly permitted by law.”

The lawsuit--which could go to trial within the year--may reverberate throughout the county because at least six other bond-seeking school districts from Thousand Oaks to Ojai have worked with the same consulting firm.

Firm financial advisors Dale Scott and Mitch Templeton were out of town on business Wednesday and could not be reached. Spirito is on vacation.

The suit seeks to have the contract with Dale Scott & Co. voided and any money paid to the company reimbursed personally by Spirito and district officials. Richards said the firm has not been paid yet because bonds have not been sold.

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The suit does not question the results of the election or seek to revoke the $81 million earmarked for repairing aging facilities and building new schools.

The central issue is “whether or not the district has used taxpayer money in order to get the bond measure passed--regardless of what it’s called or how it’s disguised,” Chatenever said. “If they have, it’s money that really belongs to the schools--and the school kids--and not to Dale Scott.”

The lawsuit further contends that district officials were encouraged to serve as bond boosters while at work and that teachers sent home fliers advocating the bond.

But Richards said the district took care to follow the law in providing information to the public without advocating a particular stance on the bond.

“The people filing the lawsuit have apparently looked into the matter in an incomplete manner,” he said. “What they’re doing now is really harming the reputation of the school district, the [school] board and the district employees through their failure to adequately investigate the facts.”

The lawsuit is “potentially libelous,” he said.

By state law, school officials can offer information on a bond measure to interested members of the public, according to experts in the California Department of Education and the state Fair Political Practices Commission. But they must take care to ensure that no public money is spent to push one position or another.

Lawsuits such as this one are not common, said Allan Keown of the state education department’s legal division.

The plaintiffs--who include 10 registered Ventura voters--say the contract with Dale Scott & Co. just does not sound right. They ask: Why hire the firm months before the election? And why did the firm agree to be paid only if the bond passed?

“It seems awfully suspicious to enter into a ‘marketing’ agreement for a bond measure that hadn’t even passed yet,” said Saul Rackauskas, chairman of the Ventura County Libertarian Party.

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Dale Scott & Co., a 10-year-old firm, has worked with a string of school districts where bonds worth $4 million to $81 million have met the necessary two-thirds voter approval. The lawsuit could have far-reaching consequences in Ventura County, where at least six other school districts hired the firm for their bond issues.

Those districts--Oxnard Elementary, Oxnard High School, Ocean View, Pleasant Valley, Ojai Unified and Conejo Valley Unified--could also be slapped with suits, Chatenever said.

“This may not be the end of the lawsuits,” he said. “I don’t know what [other districts] contracted for. If the contract provides for a Ventura-type [situation], where compensation is contingent on whether the bond passes, they might have some problems as well.”

Jeff Chancer, the associate superintendent of the Ocean View School District, said his district was very cautious during a successful $4-million bond campaign, carefully following the advice of financial advisor Templeton.

“He must have said 100 times what we could and couldn’t do,” Chancer said. “We erred on the side of being conservative. We didn’t make any mistakes--we didn’t use any office copy machines or any district postage . . . We were spotless.”