While not a final ruling, a ruling was issued in the records lawsuit against the Douglas County School Board.
In a ruling issued last week, District Judge Thomas Gregory found that four Douglas County School Board trustees and the school district are liable for court costs but are exempt from civil penalties.
The petitioners have two weeks to submit their “costs and reasonable attorney fees,” stemming from their effort to obtain public records from trustees.
The respondents then have two weeks to reply with a division of the costs.
According to the order, the petitioners would have another seven days to argue for the fees before the judge renders his decision.
Gregory issued a 41-page ruling on Oct. 10 after hearing testimony on Sept. 17-18 from school board trustees and administrators.
The lawsuit was filed in August 2023 by petitioners Joe Girdner, Robbe Lehmann, Dean Miller, and Marty Swisher seeking public records requested in May and July from the Douglas County School District and trustees David Burns, Susan Jansen, Katherine Dickerson, and Doug Englekirk.
The requests sought communications to, from, and between the four trustees regarding various topics because petitioners believed they were using their personal devices to conduct board matters or receive instructions from outside sources.
According to the judgment, part of the DCSD and trustees’ main argument was that petitioners “rushed to the courthouse with minds set on accruing attorney fees and making the trustees look bad.”
“The point is well taken,” said Gregory.
Gregory observed the timeline from when the trustees took office in January 2023, to the change of legal counsel and concluded that the respondents attempted to communicate their compliance, but the petitioners carried on with their own deadline regardless.
“Petitioners did not extend common courtesy to DCSD and trustees and gave no consideration for DCSD and trustees circumstances,” said Gregory.
Despite the petitioners’ “rush,” the DCSD and Trustees still refused for over a year to conduct adequate searches, claiming the litigation was frivolous, unreasonable, and groundless.
“The litigation was not frivolous, unreasonable, or groundless,” Gregory stated in his judgement. “The petitioners sought a court order requiring DCSD and Trustees to conduct adequate searches and produce all nonprivileged responsive documents and DCSD and trustees refused further searches and pointedly refused the existence of additional records, yet after a year into the lawsuit and a court order the DCSD and trustees conducted a search and produced a small number of records.”
During testimony, DCSD and trustees made claims they did not know about the lawsuit, yet during public meetings they indicated they had received many communications about the public records request.
In another example, DCSD produced emails demonstrating usage of the trustees’ private devices for the provision of public services, but the trustees did not produce the same records, even after prior DCSD legal counsel, Rick Hsu, recognized the problem and warned the trustees that if transparency was not remedied, petitioners would file a lawsuit and be entitled to attorney fees.
“DCSD and trustees knew or should have known, without being told by petitioners, that their initial searches and corresponding productions were inadequate,” said Gregory in his judgement.
