Huntington Beach will pay $182,092 in attorneys’ fees and costs after losing a case over the city declining to release the complete 2023 air show settlement agreement.
Gina Clayton-Tarvin, a resident and a member of the Ocean View School District Board of Trustees, sued the city in 2023 after City Attorney Michael Gates refused to release the entire settlement agreement to her in a public records request. At that point, the city had only released a one-page summary of the settlement.
Orange County Judge Jonathan Fish issued a tentative ruling ordering the city to pay $182,092.50 to Clayton-Tarvin’s attorneys. The ruling will become final in a few days, according to Clayton-Tarvin’s attorneys, since both sides did not raise further arguments to the court’s tentative ruling.
Gregory Pleasants, one of the attorneys for Clayton-Tarvin, said attorneys’ fees in California Public Records Act cases are mandatory, a choice made by the legislature to incentivize the right to access public records.
Pleasants said Huntington Beach wouldn’t have to pay the attorney’s fees “if they had just complied with the law in the first place.”
“The city for 18 months fought a legal battle without a legal basis for foundation,” Pleasants said. “They wasted everyone’s time and money doing so.”
Fish ruled in May that the document must be made public and it was released weeks later.
Clayton-Tarvin and some other community members have criticized financial promises the city made in the settlement, including $4.9 million in cash and waiving fees for the event.
A state committee had requested the settlement be audited and the city was sued in a separate case in November for not cooperating with the California State Auditor’s office.
Clayton-Tarvin’s attorneys said they had originally offered the city to settle for $176,263 in July. They had asked the court for $557,945 under a two-times multiplier.
The city rejected that and instead offered $35,000 before later raising the amount, they said.
“Once again, Michael Gates has played the Pied Piper, leading the city into wasting hundreds of thousands of unnecessary legal fees,” Clayton-Tarvin said in a statement. “The city could have settled this matter for less money to my lawyers— and less money to outside lawyers — if they had settled this matter six months ago. In fact, the city should have spent zero dollars if it had just followed the law in the first place.”
Gates said in an email that Clayton-Tarvin was a “highly litigious individual.”
“The fees awarded are exorbitant but in light of the over half million dollars Clayton-Tarvin’s ‘pro bono’ (for free) attorney was seeking, this amount is quite a discount. Clayton-Tarvin did not get from the court what she asked for,” Gates said in an email.
