South County was awash in warm fuzzies last week with the announcement that the small but pugnacious Pajaro-Sunny Mesa Community Services District had dropped its two lawsuits against the embattled Pajaro Valley Water Management Agency. In a joint statement, PVWMA general manager Mary Bannister said the two parties had “buried the hatchet,” while Pajaro-Sunny Mesa GM Joe Rosa referred to the need to “join hands” with “our friends at PVWMA.”
At issue was Pajaro-Sunny Mesa’s 2008 lawsuit seeking immediate repayment of an $80-per-acre-foot fee that was ruled illegal in 2007. That ruling stuck the agency with a $13 million repayment obligation to various individuals and districts, payable over several years. Pajaro-Sunny Mesa said it was owed $326,000 of that, and yesterday. In December 2009, settlement talks went awry as Pajaro-Sunny Mesa tripled its demand to nearly $1 million (the extra in the form of interest and legal fees)—a sum agency lawyer Tony Condotti more or less described as obnoxious. “To put it charitably, it seems like a substantial overreach,” he told the Sentinel. After the settlement talks collapsed, Pajaro-Sunny Mesa sued again.
But now there’s peace in the valley. As we dabbed at our eyes, one statement caught our attention. “We at Pajaro/Sunny Mesa have reevaluated the lawsuits against the PVWMA,” Rosa said. “After much soul-searching we agreed that the best course of action is to settle the litigation and to move forward as a partner with the agency.”
Soul-searching? Really? Maybe “resume-searching” is more like it, as in “desperately seeking a new board of directors.” In the last 12 months, three of Pajaro-Sunny Mesa’s five board members—former president Joe Espinola, Linda Sandoval and Connie Easterling—have been quietly replaced by Stephen Caron, Stephen Snodgrass and Dave Tavarez (the two remaining board members are Donna Jean Brown and Harry Wiggins), leaving a less litigious majority in charge. In the end, the agency will pay Pajaro-Sunny Mesa about $400,000, while the district will fork over some $110,000 in unpaid fees to the agency. You might call it a peace dividend.
