By Donna Westfall – November 1, 2026 At the City Council meeting held October 19th, during public comment I announced the first lawsuit against the city which covered the water rates. On October 23rd, I filed the 2nd lawsuit which covered the sewer rates. Then on Friday, October 30th, filed a Notice of Related Cases so that we'd only need one Judge on the case instead of two. The following video is my public comment notifying the city of the first lawsuit. In case you're wondering why I didn't file both lawsuits at the same time it's because I'M NOT AN ATTORNEY. There are many, many steps to filing a lawsuit. I had to have a lot of hand holding and instruction. Very time consuming. Then there's the costs: $435 to file each lawsuit and $450 to publish each of the Summons in the Triplicate for four weeks. Fortunately many folks contributed to the cause. Here are a few of the unique ins and outs because it's called a REVERSE VALIDATION lawsuit. Ever wonder why something happens? I did. In 2021, Senate Bill 323 authored by State Senator Anna Caballero, was heavily pushed for and backed by public utility and water agency associations. Before SB 323 took effect on January 1, 2022, cities and water districts faced major financial vulnerability. Ratepayers could sue over a Proposition 218 water rate hike years after it was approved. If a court ruled the rate hike invalid down the line, cities would owe millions in multi-year refunds, devastating their infrastructure budgets. Therefore, to protect city budgets and ensure financial certainty, the legislature explicitly applied California's existing "Validation Statutes" to water and sewer fees. Cities are required to publish legal and validation statutes in a newspaper to ensure public transparency, satisfy due process requirements, and provide verifiable proof of notice. Here's the thing. The City was supposed to publish a Validation Statute in the Triplicate. They never did. Here's something else: We only had 120 days to get this lawsuit going or we could forget about the whole thing. One of the biggest hurdles we're facing is the 120 days challenge. The City will insist it started on June 1st which mean the lawsuits had until September 29th to be filed. We insist it became effective on July 1st which means we had until October 29th. SB 323 strictly limits lawsuits to within 120 days of the later of the rate's adoption or its effective date. The rate was adopted on June 1st. The effective date was July 1st. The Judge will make the final determination. Not many people know about Reverse Validations. The Court Clerk told us one of our papers was not correct and handed us a Mandatory paper which would have automatially lost our case giving us only 30 days for a response. I had to run to the law library and confer with my people in the know who instructed me that with a Reverse Validation we had 60 days. So the Court Clerk had to be challenged and after she talked it over with three others in their office, found that we were correct. I've attached a copy of the Summons because I learned that a Summons instructs the city that they have only so many days to respond to thse lawsuits. December 10th is the deadline for a response in the water rate lawsuit. December 15th is the deadline in the sewer rate lawsuit. Unfortunately, you'd need a magnifying glass to read this, but it is published in the Triplicate.