Schools

School District: Allegation of Lack of Transparency is "Specious"

Contra Costa Times article decried MDUSD's 'dismal reputation' in making public records available in case of Bond Oversight Committee member.

The school district's attorney said Monday that the Mount Diablo Unified School District extended itself to comply with a voluminous record request from a Bond Oversight Committee member, and "the allegation of lack of transparency is kind of a specious allegation."

The district "has a long and dismal reputation for lacking in even basic transparency," charged the Contra Costa Times in a copyrighted article over the weekend. 

The article criticized Greg Rolen, the school district's attorney, for charging Alicia Minyen, a certified public accountant who serves on the sprawling district's Bond Oversight Committee, 10 cents a page for 1,496 pages of records she had requested.

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"It raises a great deal of suspicion over what the district may be hiding and illustrates a galling lack of common sense in its top administrators," reporter Thomas Peele wrote in the Contra Costa Times article.

Rolen said the committee as a whole, including Minyen, had a public meeting Aug. 22 at which the district had bond counsel and financial advisers present to answer questions.

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Before that meeting, Minyen made a written request for extensive documents, Rolen said. State regulations are unclear about the rights of individual bond committee members, Rolen said, so he treated Minyen's request as one from a member of the public under the Public Records Act.

That means the district had 10 days to supply documents it could or specify ones that came from another agency, which the district met, Rolen said. Many of Minyen's questions asked for legal advice, whether a given procedure was legal, Rolen said. 

The copying charges are mandated by the Public Records Act, which forbids the district from factoring staff time into the cost, Rolen said. "We didn't charge anything that we don't charge everyone else," he said. 

The Contra Costa Times article criticized the district for spending $88 million in solar energy projects that weren't mentioned in the district's campaign brochures for Measure C last year.

Superintendent Steven Lawrence, in an Aug. 26 "Mt. Diablo USD News Update" on the district website, sketched in an overview of the district's installation of solar energy improvements, "the largest K-12 project in the nation." The project utilizes federal Clean Renewable Energy Bonds.


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