OID accused of ignoring judge’s order in fallowing lawsuit

A judge wants to know more before deciding whether to hold the Oakdale Irrigation District in contempt of court over fallout from its stalled fallowing program.

“The court needs to vet this further,” Stanislaus Superior Court Judge Roger Beauchesne said at a hearing Friday.

The question is whether OID violated the May 27 order of another judge who shut down the fallowing proposal because OID had not studied environmental impacts. That would include how the local groundwater table is affected when Stanislaus River water is shipped elsewhere.

The order from Judge William Mayhew bars OID and its “agents, servants, assigns, contractors and all those acting under them or in concert with them” from “taking any actions in furtherance” of the fallowing plan. The plan would have paid farmers willing to idle some land with proceeds from selling freed-up water to outside buyers.

Mayhew’s order specified that OID must not enter into contracts, distribute money or make “other physical changes to the environment,” such as land leveling, or work on ditches or pipelines.

But at that point, OID had already contracted with people farming 59 plots. Expecting to be paid eventually, some already had begun ripping out pipelines and fixing ditches, and three farmers later submitted five reimbursement requests totaling $53,361.

The OID board on Nov. 1 decided to have General Manager Steve Knell and an OID attorney work with contracting farmers to settle claims. If more roll in, the payout could amount to $1.5 million, the district’s chief financial officer said at a board meeting Wednesday.

Such payments would clearly violate Mayhew’s order, said Sacramento attorney Patrick Soluri, representing plaintiffs in the fallowing lawsuit.

“These invoices clearly show that work was performed well after” Mayhew’s ruling, Soluri said. “There was plenty of time for OID to comply with the order and notify owners that this program was halted. Apparently, OID did not do so.”

What contracting farmers were told is in dispute. Knell knew that state water officials would not approve an initial version of the district’s request for fallowing transfers as early as March, suggesting the plan started unraveling then. But Knell never explained changes in public meetings and two OID board members told another judge they were kept in the dark as well.

At Friday’s hearing, OID attorney Fred Silva said the district could be hit with as many as 59 claims. A court order preventing OID from settling them could result in that many lawsuits, Silva said, putting the district in an impossible situation.

Beauchesne told both sides to continue arguing in written briefs, to be followed by another hearing where witnesses could be called to testify in a month or so.

Although OID signed idling contracts with people farming 59 plots, some farmers had multiple contracts and Knell has refused to say how many individual farms are involved. The fallowing lawsuit initially named board member Gary Osmundson as a defendant because he initially signed up for the program, then cast the deciding vote to create it and stood to make $119,000. OID later said he was not among those with contracts, and he was dismissed from the lawsuit.

Other aspects of the lawsuit are scheduled to go to trial in January.

This story was originally published November 18, 2016 at 7:43 PM with the headline "OID accused of ignoring judge’s order in fallowing lawsuit."