Legal Woes Mount for Orange Unified

Compounding Orange Unified School District’s legal troubles, an open-government activist has filed a lawsuit alleging the school board held illegal closed meetings.

In an unrelated action, two former employees have accused a trustee of defamation.

In the first lawsuit, filed Thursday in Orange County Superior Court, Richard McKee, a board member of the California First Amendment Coalition, alleges the school board met illegally to discuss the fate of Barham Ranch.

The coalition is a Sacramento-based nonprofit group that monitors whether public agencies are following open-government laws.

The 526-acre undeveloped property in an unincorporated area of Orange is owned by the school district. The county has expressed a desire to buy the land to add to its network of parks surrounding Barham, an idea supported by local environmentalists.

Board President Bob Viviano said Friday he had not seen the lawsuit and could not comment on it, but he maintained the board has acted legally.

He said the board has not made an official decision on what to do with the land, but that he would like to see a portion of it used to build schools and the remainder sold to the county.

“We’re going to have to build a high school, a middle school and couple of elementary schools” to meet future demands, Viviano said. “That’s my vision for Barham.”

Viviano and the rest of the board met in closed sessions on four occasions between June and August to discuss the property. The first three were listed as discussions on “potential litigation” dealing with a pending county ordinance that could restrict road construction on county parks. There is no road access to Barham Ranch, which is surrounded by three parks: Santiago Oaks, Weir Canyon and Irvine Regional.

Although the Brown Act allows elected officials to hold closed sessions on litigation matters, McKee argues there was no litigation pending since the county ordinance had not yet passed into law. The Board of Supervisors will consider the ordinance Tuesday.

McKee, who lives in La Verne, said he came across the Barham Ranch issue while attending a board meeting in August.

“I just saw it as my responsibility,” McKee said Friday.

A Longtime Focus of Controversy

The Orange Unified board has been the focus of controversy for years, including a gay-straight student club issue that made national headlines in 1999. In June, a slate of candidates backed by the local teachers union unseated three board members.

The new board majority has had to deal with legal troubles new and old. In one of the several pending lawsuits, two former employees now accuse one of the trustees of slander.

Judith Frutig and Barbara Bowen, who filed a wrongful-termination lawsuit in May, added new complaints Wednesday.

The two accuse trustee Kathy Ward of slandering them during a board meeting Sept. 20, 2000, in which she characterized them as incompetent. The district had previously said that their positions were eliminated for financial reasons.