District taken to task for inspiring lawsuits

4/17/00, Community College Week

Calif. Tax Group Seeks to Hold College Officials Accountable for Lawsuits 

IRVINE, Calif. —A taxpayers group here has accused seven South Orange County Community College District officials of litigation overkill, demanding last month that those officials pay more than $500,000 in legal fees from lost court battles.

            “We’re tired of this group wasting taxpayer money,” Marilyn Vassos, a member of the Trustee Accountability Project, said in a statement to the news media. “The board has lost one suit after another, yet continues to pursue doomed lawsuits.”

            Vassos demanded in the news release and in a similar letter sent to district officials that, “It’s time to hold (college officials) individually responsible for this reckless behavior.”

            The troubled district—with 32,700 students, one of the nation’s 20 largest two-year college districts—has battled one high-profile lawsuit after another for the past three years and lost nearly every one of them.

            Nancy M. Padberg, president of the district’s trustee board, told a local newspaper here that the group’s demand to repay the legal costs [is] “ridiculous ... I can’t even respond to it. It’s irresponsible.”

            The district’s recent court battles include:

• An Orange County Superior Court judge ruled in 1997 that trustees violated the state’s open-meetings law when it appointed Dr. Raghu P. Mathur as the acting president of the district’s Irvine Valley College. He was later legally appointed president. • The American Civil Liberties Union sued Mathur in 1998, accusing him of violating students’ First Amendment free speech rights during a demonstration at which they criticized the president and his leadership. • A federal judge late last year issued an injunction that prevents district administrators from enforcing South Orange policies that restrict students from making speeches, handing out fliers and demonstrating in popular student gathering spots. • An Orange County Superior Court judge ordered district trustees in 1999 to begin tape recording the closed portions of its meetings because of the board’s “persistent and defiant misconduct” in violating the state’s open-meetings law. • A federal judge ruled that Dr. Cedric A. Sampson, the district’s chancellor, violated Irvine Valley philosophy professor Roy Bauer’s rights by ordering him to seek counseling and soften articles and opinion columns critical of the district’s administrators in two campus newsletters.

     The judge in that case ordered the district to pay $126,000 in attorney’s fees for Bauer. Another judge last year also awarded Bauer $98,000 in legal fees in one of the lawsuits he filed over violations of the state’s open-meetings law.

            Sampson told Community College Week last month that South Orange officials have appealed most of those court cases. Several are pending before the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.

            A final resolution could take several years. But Sampson says that “none of these cases has been definitively decided. We are defending ourselves vigorously...We are going to have our day in court.”

            Asked why district officials have continued to appeal court cases they have lost, Sampson said South Orange trustees and administrators believe they are in the right. “There are serious principles involved here,” he said.

            Sampson and Padberg are among the district officials that the taxpayer group has demanded repay the district for litigation costs. Also named were Mathur and trustees Dorothy Fortune, Steven J. Frogue, Donald P. Wagner and John S. Williams.

            The taxpayer group, which also has filed an open-records request for records and details of the attorney’s fees in the lawsuits, did not name two trustees who opposed most of the district’s legal actions—David B. Lang and Marcia Milchiker.