EVERETT — Arlington School District must pay nearly $29,000 in attorney’s fees to the watchdog group that brought suit for the school board’s violations of the state Open Public Meetings Act.

The nonprofit, Spokane-based Center for Justice sued the district in 2008 as part of the group’s statewide effort to bring attention to enforcement of the meetings act.

Snohomish County Superior Court Judge Ellen Fair recently awarded what she termed “reasonable, if not generous” fees and costs to the center.

The district, which acknowledged that the Arlington School Board repeatedly violated the Open Public Meetings Act, was ready to pay the center’s attorney’s fees, district lawyer David Hokit said.

The meetings act contains a provision that if a party brings a suit and prevails, it is entitled to its attorney’s fees.

“But the Center for Justice had asked for $210,000 in fees, so in the face of the requested amount, the district was pleased with the judge’s award,” Hokit said.

Center for Justice lawyer Michele Earl-Hubbard said the center is not happy with the judge’s award.

“We don’t think the amount was sufficient,” Earl-Hubbard said.

The Center for Justice plans to file an appeal, she said.

“From day one the school district has tried to portray the Center for Justice as being opportunistic,” Earl-Hubbard said. “But the school board had a recurring pattern of open meetings violations that needed to be stopped.”

The Center for Justice learned about the school board’s meetings violations in 2007 when the state Auditor’s Office told the school district it needed to change its practices on open meetings.

At the time, the board regularly conducted executive sessions before starting most of its scheduled public meetings. District officials said they thought they were doing people a favor. The idea was they could have the regular meetings and not make people wait around for the board to finish closed-door sessions.

State auditors, however, told school officials that the law required the school board to first meet in public before convening an executive session. Further, auditors said the district was doing an inadequate job of explaining the board’s legal grounds for taking the public’s business behind closed doors. The school district agreed with the auditors’ findings and changed its practices, Hokit said.

However, the Center for Justice maintained that even after the state issued its audit, the school district continued to violate the Open Public Meetings Act.

About a year after the Center for Justice sued the school district, both the public-interest group and the school district asked Judge Fair for summary judgment in the case.

In October, Fair ruled that school board members did not intentionally hide information from the public and so were not required to pay individual fines.

She also told lawyers for the center that they failed to prove that the school board conducted study sessions and special meetings without giving adequate public notice.

The remaining issue in the litigation is whether or not the school board met for dinner and a retreat without giving proper public notice. The Center for Justice can’t file its appeal until this is resolved and the case is closed, so it has asked to drop these allegations, Earl-Hubbard said.

The appeal on the study session claims and the attorney’s fee award will be filed at the state Court of Appeals.

“The school district could have avoided all of this, as well as their own attorney’s fees, if they had just admitted two years ago that the board violated the Open Public Meetings Act and paid our costs back then,” Earl Hubbard said.

After suing the Arlington School District, Earl-Hubbard sent a letter in March 2008 to the school board offering to settle the matter for about $11,000 in costs and fees. The settlement demand also included payment of a penalty of $100 for each violation of the Open Public Meetings Act from each board member.

“Ms. Earl-Hubbard frequently says that the district had opportunities to settle the case, but what she fails to mention is that the school board penalties would have amounted to as much as $50,000,” Hokit said.

Instead, the school district chose to fight the lawsuit, Earl-Hubbard said.

“Mr. Hokit and I could have had a conversation and we could have dropped the penalties against individual board members,” she said. “We just wanted to make sure these violations would never happen again. This case was a good illustration of why the law needs to be followed.”

Gale Fiege: 425-339-3427; gfiege@heraldnet.com.