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Dozens of speakers voiced their anger toward Sunol Glen Unified School District Board President Ryan Jergensen at last week’s school board meeting after seeing an email between him and the school district’s attorney, Lindsay Moore, in which he asked if she could make a request to the Alameda County Registrar of Voters’ Office to get a copy of signed recall petitions.
The discussion came up during the April 23 board meeting after Trustee Peter (Ted) Romo leaked the conversation between the two and stated that it was an issue because in the email, Jergensen wrote that he wanted the inquiry to remain confidential.
“Just curious … Looks like an attorney for a school district can request a copy of signed petitions. Can you do that? Would you?” Jergensen said in the email to Moore on March 12. “Would you please keep this confidential and not share this question with Ted, (Molleen Barnes), or others as that would definitely cause quite a stir with the recall people even that I’m asking?”
Jergensen stated during his closing comments on April 23 that Moore sent Romo a memo stating that Romo was not legally allowed to disclose that confidential information and Jergensen said that after sending that memo, Moore quit her job as attorney for the district.
“With this knowledge, Mr. Romo intentionally violated the attorney-client privilege by releasing to the public, confidential communications between the attorney for the school district and members of the board,” Jergensen wrote in a statement to the Inform Sunol newsletter on April 22. “Mr. Romo’s lack of regard to his obligation of confidentiality now requires the school district to hire new counsel at the most inopportune time when we are right in the middle of bond projects and hiring a new superintendent/principal.”
Despite Jergensen’s assertion that he had the fiduciary duty to the school district to request the names of those who signed the petition to recall him and Trustee Linda Hurley, both Hurley and Romo voted in favor of placing Romo’s resolution proposing to censure Jergensen on the agenda for the next meeting of the three-member board.
Jergensen didn’t vote on the matter due to conflict of interest given that the resolution pertained to him.
Romo said during the meeting that originally, he had planned on placing his resolution to censure Jergensen on that week’s agenda.
The resolution goes over two governance board bylaws that state, among other things, that board members are expected to hold themselves to high ethical conduct standards and that they should not expend “any public money for the purpose of seeking elective office.”
It then lays out the email communication between Jergensen and Moore on March 12.
“Ryan Jergensen sought to have the district’s legal counsel use her position as counsel for the district, and expend time and resources of the district, in interactions with the Alameda County Registrar of Voters, to ‘request a copy of signed petitions’ of individuals who signed petitions for Ryan’s recall as a member of the governing board,” the resolution states.
Late last year Sunol residents, commuter parents and community members formed a pro-recall campaign that worked on gathering signatures and getting a petition passed by the county to conduct a recall election for Jergensen and Hurley
The recall election is scheduled for July 2, but in the last couple of months both of the trustees were a part of a lawsuit that aimed to get the Registrar of Voters’ Office to stop the recall process after alleging election code errors. That lawsuit was denied.
According to the emails that were leaked by Romo, the lawyer that had represented the two trustees in that lawsuit against the registrar’s office — Thomas Knutsen — had reached out to the Alameda County Counsel’s office to obtain a copy or review the petitions, which Romo stated in his resolution was Jergensen attempting to “block the recall”.
Knutsen’s request was denied by the county.
“The petitions are not public documents, and their examination is very limited,” Raymond Lara, senior deputy county counsel, told Knutsen in a March 6 email. “As I understand it, the petition was found to be sufficient, so not even the proponents can examine them at this point.”
That same email from Lara stated that a government code limits who can view the petition to other entities, including a school district attorney, which is what led to Jergensen asking if Moore could request a copy of the petition. However, she could not do so.
“Because I represent the district and not individual board members, I cannot make that request under the conditions that you have requested,” Moore emailed Jergensen on March 13.
Romo said that Jergensen’s request to obtain the petition was unacceptable, unethical and a violation of the board’s governing bylaws, which is why he had wanted to place his resolution on Tuesday’s agenda. But as it was revealed during the meeting, the board had to legally discuss the resolution in a public forum first and vote to place it on a future agenda.
While Hurley and Romo voted in favor of placing the resolution on the next meeting agenda, dozens of residents, parents and community members made it clear to Jergensen that they were not happy when they learned about his request.
“So Ryan, if you weren’t trying to operate in secrecy why did you say ‘don’t tell Ted or Molly’?” Laura Oka asked. “I’m a little stuck there because it sounds underhanded, unethical and secret … and you haven’t explained it properly.”
“If this is board business, this fiduciary responsibility, why not discuss it with the board as a whole?” Oka added. “And you haven’t explained why you or the board have a legal pressing need to see the names of the petition signers.”
Others also said Jergensen got caught red-handed doing something that they said was clearly not right and how this was just one of his latest attempts at trying to find out who the people who signed his recall petition were in order to scare them into changing their minds.
“Now you are trying to get the names of the people who you think opposed you, who started this recall. What are you going to do with those names?” asked Erin Choin, a Sunol resident who is on the pro-recall campaign. “The only thing I can think is intimidate or retaliate … you sought to violate the protection of these citizens.”
Peggy Carpenter, a former longtime school board trustee, also spoke out and said transparency is the most important thing as an elected official and that what Jergensen did was flat out wrong, which is why he should resign.
Carpenter is also involved in the recall campaign.
“These signatures are not in the public domain, they are private. Our community group promised the voters no one would know who signed, only the Registrar of Voters and the person who collected the signatures,” Carpenter said. “Ryan, your efforts to gain access is a violation of this right of privacy and it needs addressing.”
Although Carpenter noted that community members have pledged to cover the cost of the election so that it won’t take dollars away from the school, she also pointed out that resignations by Jergensen and Hurley would save money.
“I’m asking Ryan, you and Linda to resign,” she added. “It will save the cost of an election of $15,000 to $17,000, which was on the petition that people signed, not the $20,000 to $25,000 that has been passed around.”
While the majority of speakers shared the same sentiment of opposing Jergensen’s actions, there was also a small group of speakers who showed their support for Jergensen and Hurley.
Some said that Romo has been the main problem for causing the divisiveness in the community and one Sunol resident went as far as saying he agreed with Jergensen’s inquiry to the registrar’s office because the office has made mistakes in the past.
“The Alameda County Registrar of Voters’ Office is one of the most corrupt and dysfunctional offices in the United States,” Sunol resident Bob Frillman said. “The registrar of voters miscounted then falsely declared a school board candidate in last November’s election.”
While Jergensen did not comment on the censure resolution that will now be on the next board meeting agenda, he did offer some explanation about why he had requested the copy of the petition to determine if the cost of the recall was legally required.
“When the questions regarding the recall and the cost were brought to me by several different community members, I took those to our attorney and I asked her with confidentiality to ask what do we do about the community members that are concerned,” he said.
“In exercising that fiduciary duty, which is the highest duty imposed by the law, it was incumbent upon me, as well as other members of the board, to determine if the expenditure of $20,000 for a recall election was legally required,” he stated in his letter to Inform Sunol.
Jergensen then went on to explain that the community only received a part of all the emails he exchanged and that he also told the attorney that he didn’t want to see the names on the petition and that he only wanted to make sure the cost of the recall was appropriate.
Jergensen and Hurley also took turns calling out Romo, saying that it was ironic that he was mad about Jergensen’s email request when Romo himself has broken several board policies and, more importantly, broke the attorney-client privilege Jergensen had with Moore.
“Ted, you should keep confidential matters confidential,” Jergensen said. “Ted, you should understand that the authority rests with the whole board and not with individuals.”
Jergensen added that it was “unethical” for Romo to use his right to access communications between another board member and the attorney to use “for your personal agenda and your politics.”
Hurley also said during her closing comments that she plans on bringing up Romo’s past instances where he broke board bylaws to push his political agenda and that she will be bringing a similar censure resolution against Romo.
“Mr. Romo has taken it upon himself to usurp all kinds of things,” Hurley said. “We’re going to go into this more next time.”
But Romo defended himself and said that Jergensen’s attorney-client confidentiality argument has no basis due to California evidence code and as supported by the State Supreme Court because the school district’s attorney is not Jergensen’s personal attorney.
The next board meeting is currently set for May 14.