Paul Clinton
The Orange County Sanitation District's 25-member board has come
under fire from one of its own members over a meeting held last week
that may have violated the state's open meeting laws.
Huntington Beach Mayor Debbie Cook stormed out of the meeting,
held at the district's Fountain Valley offices on Sept. 26, and later
criticized it as illegal.
Cook, an attorney who specialized in environmental law before she
was elected to the Huntington Beach City Council in 2000, said the
district inappropriately discussed a public issue by shielding itself
with an exception in state law allowing agencies to discuss legal
strategy behind closed doors.
"It was absolutely illegal," Cook said. "They were trying to keep
the public out."
At the regularly scheduled meeting, the district's appointed board
members held discussions with representatives from the Environmental
Protection Agency and the Santa Ana Regional Water Quality Control
Board.
Newport Beach Mayor Tod Ridgeway, also a member of the district's
board, said he shared Cook's concerns.
"She's probably right," Ridgeway said. "It probably shouldn't have
been a closed session."
Members of the district's staff defended the meeting. Tom
Woodruff, the agency's attorney, determined that it would not violate
state law, spokeswoman Lisa Murphy said.
"We believe that the meeting was a legitimate closed-session
meeting," Murphy said. "The district called the meeting because of
potential litigation."
As the district moves to a higher level of treatment for the
234-million gallons of waste water it releases into the ocean each
day, officials there are worried about the possibility that the EPA
would file a lawsuit and levy harsh fines of up to $25,000 a day.
Since the mid-1980s, the district has been allowed to unload
moderately treated sewage into the ocean environment because it has
been granted a special waiver by the EPA. The waiver gave the agency,
in essence, an exemption to the Clean Water Act of 1972.
Even though the agency voted on July 17 to drop the waiver and
step up its treatment levels, the EPA would be legally required to
bring a suit, said Jim Ferryman, a board member and trustee in the
Newport Mesa Unified School District.
"The minute we don't comply with the waiver, they have to sue us,"
Ferryman said.
To avert that suit, the board has been negotiating with the EPA. A
week ago, district officials pitched the idea of filing a preemptive
lawsuit, then asking a judge to sign a consent decree, which would
