John Arteaga, a regular columnist for the Ukiah Daily Journal, recently mentioned the expensive lawsuit filed by the Ukiah Valley Sanitation District against the City of Ukiah. The lawsuit has been in the works for more than five years now and has made Ukiah attorney, and former Mendo DA Duncan James a millionaire, assuming he wasn’t one before this endless wrangle fell into his lap.
Arteaga: “…This brings us to the subject of the county’s [actually the Ukiah Valley] Sanitation District taxpayers and ratepayers. I (and I’m sure I’m not alone in this feeling) am filled with futile rage at the most egregious instance of vampiring on the public’s fiscal jugular that I’ve witnessed in my several decades of residence in our fair county; let me pose some questions that might better be answered by a grand jury than an ordinary citizen without full background knowledge. Who provided legal services to the Sanitation District before their current Attorney was hired by the district? Is the former Attorney’s office that handled the Sanitation District really the Mendocino County Counsel? Who worked for the County Counsel, and then went to work for the Sanitation District’s current Attorney?”
Arteaga is referring, of course, to Doug ‘The Midnight Rambler’ Losak, former County Counsel who abruptly resigned as “interim County Counsel” in September of 2015 to take a job with Duncan James, the firm which filed the Sanitation District’s original lawsuit and which continues to provide costly legal services to the Sanitation District paid for by District customers through ever higher sewage rates.
Arteaga continues, “Now, if my information is correct, instead of the county handling legal matters for the Sanitation District in-house at a relatively reasonable rate, the SD decides to go with what must be the highest priced lawyers ever to hang a shingle in our modest little Burg. An apparently naive SD board seems to have been hoodwinked into filing a preposterous $30 million suit against the city for a claim that goes back to ancient times. Apparently, their contention is that the city’s contributions have not been in accordance with their contract for decades.”
The current Sanitation District Board, however, is not the same board that filed the lawsuit — there are three new District Board members, retired geologist Julie Bawcom, Ukiah massage therapist Andrea Reed and Ukiah contractor Ernie Wipf, each of whom were elected last November on a platform of ending the controversial and expensive litigation. But, so far, it shows no sign of ending as Duncan James and Losak run up the legal tab.
Arteaga continues: “Check it out; they have already racked up legal bills with this unconscionably mercenary law firm of $8 MILLION! Before they have met a single time in a courtroom!”
We’re not sure who “they” are in this context, but the lawsuit has mysteriously been transferred to Sonoma County where, we last heard, a judge has ruled that the Sanitation District cannot claim money due them prior to the statute of limitations, which means that the starting number for the lawsuit is much less than the $30 million in the original claim, which went back to the 1950s.
Arteaga continues: “It seems to me, as an uninformed layperson in the matter, that it must constitute either malfeasance or negligence on the part of the board of directors of the Sanitation District to have squandered this much ratepayer money on this quixotic roll of the jurisprudential dice. I have news for them; they are not going to recover $30 million from the city of Ukiah. No way. What kills me is the pathetic reluctance of virtually everyone involved to simply take the bull by the horns, schedule an all-night session with all the authorities on both sides and hammer out a deal that is at least conceivable to both sides, and to stop squandering the public’s money on these avaricious lawyers! Eight million dollars could have settled the whole matter! If only there were some kind of leadership in these supposedly public agencies!
“The city already has onerously high connection fees for its goldplated, many-millions-of-dollars recently upgraded sewage treatment plant. I’ll bet that the designers and contractors on that gig looked upon the upgrade funding as free money. Well, there is no such thing as free money, and the city and surrounding areas will be paying the price for decades to come in foregone possibilities for creating new housing, employment, industry etc. due to the sky high connection fees that are perhaps now, especially after this horrible hemorrhaging of the public’s meager tax take, cast in stone for the foreseeable future.”
Nothing to disagree with there.
And Arteaga is right that it’s very fishy that Doug Losak suddenly became the Sanitation District’s much more expensive attorney soon after resigning to take a position working for Duncan James. Losak still appears regularly at the Sanitation District Board meetings, charging hundreds of dollars an hour for unnecessary legal advice having nothing to do with the lawsuit. Although they do spend considerable time in closed session about the still-pending lawsuit, emerging from closed session with the time-worn announcement that “direction was given to staff.” Obviously that direction has not included, “Settle this now.”
The three new Board members who presumably want to settle the case have had no perceptible impact on the lawsuit which seems to have acquired a life of its own and is out of the control of the Sanitation District Board or Ukiah’s city council. Of the three, Ms. Bawcom is the only one who seems to be trying to conscientiously represent the District’s customers.
The one entity that escaped Mr. Arteaga’s irritation is the local court system, which should have ordered the parties into settlement conferences immediately after the case was filed. Instead it has dragged out now for years with no end in sight as the lawyers — the very expensive lawyers — find more and more detailed ways to calculate how much is supposedly owed to whom — including to them.
It’s all a primo example of insider trading, Mendo style.
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