VILLA PARK
About 100 Orange and Villa Park residents attended the Serrano Water District meeting Wednesday night to urge water officials to drop their lawsuit against the Orange Unified School District.
The water district is suing the school district to force it to sell Barham Ranch, which the districts co-own, to developer SunCal. The school district wants to use the land for an elementary school; residents want it sold to the county and preserved as a nature site.
C.L. Pharris Jr., president of the water district, told the crowd that he has a “legal obligation” to sell the land because it is in the best interest of ratepayers. “The Serrano Water District is not allowed to hold property for the benefit of the county generally,” Pharris said.
During public comments, Orange Park Acres resident Marilyn Ganahl announced that the group’s law firm has identified legal deficiencies in the water district’s agreement with SunCal that make the agreement void. According to a letter from the firm to the water district, the current agreement “violates the California Environmental Quality Act because [it] failed to conduct any review or analysis of the potential environmental impacts that the development facilitated by the agreement would cause.”
Joel D. Kuperberg, attorney for the water district, said the letter is farfetched. “The opinion stretches the California Environmental Quality Act beyond what the statute reasonably intends.”
The suit is scheduled to go to trial in mid-September.
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