Judge Awards $98,000 Attorney Fees to Irvine Valley Teacher

Months after ruling that the trustees of South Orange County Community College District acted illegally by making decisions in secret, an Orange County judge awarded $98,000 in attorney fees this week to a professor who filed a lawsuit against the district.

Roy Bauer, a philosophy professor at Irvine Valley College, has sued the district twice for violating the state’s Brown Act, which requires that public meeting be open. The suits stemmed from a series of decisions the trustees made in 1997, including the reorganization of the district’s governance structure and the selection of Raghu P. Mathur as president of Irvine Valley College. The campus is one of two that make up the South Orange County Community College District; the other is Saddleback College.

In the second of Bauer’s lawsuits, Orange County Superior Court Judge Tully H. Seymour took the rare step in January of ordering the district’s trustees to tape-record all of their closed meetings for two years. At the time, Seymour cited “persistent and defiant misconduct” by the board of trustees.

In a June 8 decision that Bauer received Wednesday, the judge ordered the district to pay $98,000 in legal fees. Bauer had sought $210,000.

But payment of the fees could be years away. Both Bauer and the district have appeals pending.

In the first lawsuit, Bauer contended that Mathur’s interim appointment as president of Irvine Valley had been made illegally. The judge agreed and ordered the district to pay Bauer $14,000 in legal expenses. The district’s appeal of that ruling has been pending for about a year. In the meantime, Mathur was appointed president permanently.

The more recent case will take more than two years to resolve, said Bauer’s lawyer, Wendy Phillips, who is a professor of anthropology at Irvine Valley. Phillips attended California Western Law School before joining the Irvine Valley faculty. Bauer is her only law client.

Bauer said he was pleased with the award but criticized the district for costing the colleges so much money by appealing the cases. “It really belies their professed conservatism the way they spend money on legal fees defending their own violations of the law,” he said.

The college district’s lawyer, Spencer Covert, emphasized that Bauer was awarded less than half of what he was seeking to cover his legal expenses. And he said that, despite the judgment, the case is anything but over.