OID files lawsuit against two board members

The Oakdale Irrigation District’s anticipated lawsuit against two of its own board members was filed Tuesday, asking that a judge bar Linda Santos and Gail Altieri from board votes and discussions about a separate lawsuit on OID’s stalled fallowing program.

Santos and Altieri made themselves enemies of the district when their sworn statements were used to persuade another judge to put on hold OID’s fallowing program in May, the new lawsuit says.

The document also suggests Santos has a financial conflict because she leases land, presumably for money, to a farmer challenging the fallowing program.

Confidential, closed-door strategy sessions “will be compromised if (board members) Altieri and Santos, as opponents to the lawsuit, are present,” the lawsuit says.

“I am appalled that (the board majority) would do something like this to two board members who were overwhelmingly (elected),” Altieri said Tuesday. “If that’s the way they’re going to be doing business, so be it.”

Santos declined comment because she had not received a copy of the lawsuit. Last week, she said that neither woman had hired an attorney.

Tuesday’s legal complaint fulfills direction provided June 7 and last week by the OID board majority to sue Santos and Altieri.

In May, both provided court declarations saying they were kept in the dark about fallowing program changes that still have not been vetted in public. The declarations contained “selected facts skewed in (plaintiffs’) favor,” the new lawsuit says, and other board members blamed Santos and Altieri when the judge ultimately ruled against OID.

Tuesday’s lawsuit singles out Santos for allegedly providing a social media website with information meant to undermine the board and General Manager Steve Knell. He was quoted using the word “baggage” on a Facebook page called OID Watchdogs; Knell said “baggage” in an April 5 closed-door huddle and not in open session, the lawsuit says.

The board majority on June 9 voted to sue Santos and Altieri, and also launched an investigation into the leak, and two days later “someone edited the April 5 posting, removing quotations around the term ‘baggage’” in an effort to conceal a violation of the Brown Act, California’s open-meetings law, the new complaint says. Whatever prompted that editing constitutes another breach of closed-session confidentiality, the lawsuit says.

Santos also berated OID in a letter to the editor of The Modesto Bee, which also was posted on her Facebook page, the lawsuit says.

The women were elected in November, a short time after OID made $11.5 million selling Stanislaus River water to outside buyers with no public discussion or vote in Oakdale. Santos and Altieri had promised increased transparency in their campaigns and easily ousted longtime board members Al Bairos and Frank Clark, respectively, each by more than 20 percentage points. They recently said they will continue to resist bullying by the board majority.

“Defendants contend that they do not have a conflict of interest” in the fallowing case, the lawsuit says. “They refuse to recuse themselves from participating in and voting on (fallowing items).”

Santos and Altieri, saying they hadn’t been given time to study material, including legal warnings against the fallowing program, cast dissenting votes when the board in March agreed to create the program. It was designed to pay participating farmers for idling land, freeing up water to be shopped to outsiders. A potential deal would give farmers 20 percent of proceeds in cash, with 75 percent going toward efficiency upgrades to farmers’ equipment and 5 percent retained by OID.

The deal fell apart when OID didn’t reserve enough time for state and federal regulators to process such a sale. Knell apparently explained the change to the board behind closed doors in April, and he still hoped to pay fallowing farmers with money from a separate water sale. But the changes – apparently never ratified with a board vote, and made moot by the judge’s order – remained a mystery to the public until the board last week shed some light by releasing a confidential memo.

A plaintiff in the fallowing case, Robert Frobose, rents farmland from Santos, but she refuses to say how much money she receives from him, the lawsuit says.

This story was originally published June 28, 2016 at 4:15 PM with the headline "OID files lawsuit against two board members."