It’s Beef Week at Voice of San Diego which means our journalists are unpacking some of the biggest battles in the region. I wrote about the recent divorce between two North County water agencies from the San Diego County Water Authority and you can read it here.
But now I’ve got a beef of my own with the Water Authority.
The region’s water supplier dropped a 360-page lawsuit on San Diego’s boundary referees – the Local Agency Formation Commission or LAFCO – just weeks after it said Fallbrook Public Utilities District and Rainbow Municipal Water District could ditch the Water Authority. But the Water Authority won’t tell me how much it spent suing everybody.
The Water Authority retained the large, Oakland-based law firm Meyers Nave to help write the suit against LAFCO and its defectors. The claims were many, including how the divorce might impact the often-precarious resource that is the Sacramento-San Joaquin Bay Delta, a series of waterways and wetlands fed by snow melting in the Sierra Nevada mountain range. (That northern California water and the Colorado River are the two sources that also feed San Diego through the aqueducts controlled by the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California based in Los Angeles).
David Edwards, the Water Authority’s general counsel, said in an email that the Water Authority has the information I requested — the total cost per hour and hours spent on the litigation, a copy of the contract with Meyers Nave, and what part of the agency’s budget from whence this expense came – but those records are “exempt from production.”
The Water Authority used a justification they’ve used on past public records requests: California Government Code section 7927.705. That’s the attorney-client privilege justification. I spent months fighting back on a similar exemption in August 2021 when the Water Authority spent $167,000 on two consultant contracts without disclosing them to its own board of directors and went mum about a third $330,000 contract.
Typically, public agencies’ financial contracts – which detail the spending of public money – are considered public records. Eventually, then-General Counsel Mark Hattam admitted the existence of the contracts and that what the Water Authority spent on them can be made public.
I later reported who the Water Authority hired through those secret contracts. But in this case, we know who the consulting law firm is, but the public doesn’t know how much the Water Authority spent on suing two of its own member agencies.
The Water Authority board agreed to drop the lawsuit three months and two days after filing it in favor of forging settlement agreements with Rainbow and Fallbrook. That probably saved everyone a lot of headaches because Rainbow and Fallbrook’s boards were gearing up to sue the Water Authority back – though that never materialized.
Opacity Over Consultants Still Concerns the Water Authority’s Board
A lack of clarity over the Water Authority’s consultants is still a problem for the board. At its Nov. 16 meeting, the board’s Imported Water Committee argued about extending its contract with consultant M Strategic Communications for two years at $370,000. The Water Authority already spent $2 million on that consultant since its contract began in 2014. The firm is led by Chris Modrzejewski who worked for former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan.
Steve Castaneda, who represents South Bay Irrigation District on the board, said he wanted to see more information on what work consultants like these do for the Water Authority before voting on them, referencing a two-year, $3.2 million contract with consultant Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, LLP for special counsel legal services that the board approved on Sept. 28.
“What I’m trying to do is understand where we can cut this budget,” Castaneda said. “I want to ensure there’s not redundancy… that there’s not money being spent on consultants that are basically bumping into each other.”
Mel Katz, the Water Authority’s board chair, defended the contracts.
“Everything we keep hearing about as far as progress we’re making with MWD …. It happens because of Brownstein and Modrzejewski,” Katz said. “This to me is one of the most important contracts we would approve.
That committee OK’d the contract in the end. General Manager Dan Denham chimed in promising to provide more information on these contracts in the future.
In Other News
- Just gonna leave this here: Tonight it’s a full beaver moon, the last full moon of the fall season. (Fox 5)
- Rob Nikolewski tracked San Diego Gas and Electric’s profits since 2008 discovering the investor-owned utility under Sempra is making more money now than ever. (Union-Tribune)
- Andrew Bowen of KPBS reported that San Diego is still behind schedule on its goal to divert waste from the landfill. It’s at 71 percent but it was supposed to hit 75 percent waste diverted by 2020. Kelly Terry, a spokeswoman for the city, told me that the waste isn’t broken down into different categories. But that figure doesn’t yet include waste diverted for composting under the city’s new green bin program which began this year.
- The city of Carlsbad is working on updating its 8-year-old Climate Action Plan with a goal of cutting 85 percent of its greenhouse gas emissions (from 2016 levels) by 2045. (Union-Tribune)
- Del Mar residents are pushing back on a plan to bore through the cliffs to move a key rail corridor off a crumbling coastal cliff face. Now there’s like a dozen options. I wrote about Del Mar’s boring problem a few years ago. (Union-Tribune and Voice of San Diego)
- Here’s a cool story and footage by Maura Fox about San Diego’s “OG” rock climbers who haven’t quit. (Union-Tribune)
- Philip Salta from inewsource takes us underwater in San Diego Bay to visit aggressive algae gumming-up harbors and suffocating native plant life.