Legal Update On Air Show Settlement CPRA Case

Huntington Beach, CA-An Orange County Superior Court Judge has ordered the City of Huntington Beach to pay $182,092.50 in attorneys’ fees and costs after the City wrongfully withheld the 2023 Huntington Beach Airshow Settlement.  The Court’s award is more than twice the $91,042.82 that the City argued should be awarded. The mandatory fee award stems from the case brought by Huntington Beach resident and Ocean View School Board trustee Gina Clayton-Tarvin under the California Public Records Act, which mandates an award of attorneys’ fees when a government agency wrongfully withholds a public record.  The award came after Clayton-Tarvin’s lawyers had offered in July to settle the dispute for $176,263, which the City rejected by offering $35,000 and later $60,000.  Since that time, the City has spent unknown thousands of dollars opposing the fee motion.

Gina Clayton-Tarvin issued the following statement regarding the Court’s tentative ruling:

“Once again, Michael Gates has played the Pied Piper, leading the city into wasting hundreds of thousands of unnecessary legal fees. 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.”

In May 2023, just days after then-mayor, and now state Senate candidate, Tony Strickland announced the settlement of the Airshow litigation, Clayton-Tarvin requested that the agreement be released.  When City Attorney Michael Gates refused to release the document, Clayton-Tarvin was forced to file an action in Superior Court.  During the course of the litigation, the City unnecessarily ran up costs by filing a fruitless demurrer, a rejected ex parte application, and refused to stipulate with Clayton-Tarvin’s counsel to expedite the hearing of the case. When it was finally released, the Settlement Agreement was not for the announced cost of $5 Million, as Gates, Strickland, and other members of the Huntington Beach City Council majority claimed, but rather will cost the City more than $40 million in cash payments, parking concessions, and fee waivers, while giving the Pacific Airshow (owned by Code Four and Gates and Strickland’s political benefactor) exclusive rights to the airshow for the next 40 years.  Even despite the purported settlement, the City was still liable for claims brought by Pacific Airshow against former Mayor Kim Carr.  After Carr prevailed on a demurrer, Pacific Airshow dismissed the case against her without any payment by Carr. The Airshow Settlement is now the subject of an audit authorized by a bipartisan vote of the California Joint Legislative Audit Committee.  Gates’s office continues to expend legal resources in litigation which he has lost before both state a federal courts of appeal.  Meanwhile, Strickland is currently running for a vacant seat in the California State Senate claiming to be a fiscal conservative.