A brand new swimsuit filed in Cleveland County District Court docket alleges the Oklahoma Turnpike Authority improperly remedied its Open Assembly Act violation and owes about $42 million.
In December, the OTA was found in violation of the state’s Open Meeting Act due to obscure wording in its January and February assembly agendas, which licensed key engineering and design contracts for its controversial ACCESS Oklahoma project. The company subsequently paused all operations for the ACCESS undertaking on Dec. 8.
However legal professionals Stan Ward, Alexey Tarasov and Richard Lebarthe — the staff that received the Open Assembly case — mentioned contract funds that had already been made can’t be ratified as a result of the contracts themselves had been voided by the courtroom’s resolution.
“How might one ratify funds that had been made pursuant to contracts which were invalidated? If there’s a defect in contract formation and a contract is null and void, there couldn’t be any fee below that contract,” mentioned Tarasov. “They need to have entered into model new contracts with firms in compliance with the Open Assembly Act.”
Tarasov mentioned the OTA’s protection that funds to contractors had been executed “in good religion” — that’s, counting on recommendation from a corporation’s authorized counsel — might absolve the officers concerned with making a gift of company funds. However in the course of the Open Assembly Act case’s discovery interval, Tarasov mentioned OTA officers testified in depositions there was no reliance on authorized counsel’s opinion.
“For the OTA to say that there was reliance [on legal counsel] now would go towards what they disclosed to us within the earlier lawsuit,” Tarasov mentioned. “We instantly requested whether or not there was any reliance on the opinion of the authorized counsel in voting on these agenda objects.”
Regardless, the “good religion” protection doesn’t apply to outdoors entities like engineering corporations, in order that they’re responsible for the funds, Tarasov mentioned.
“No quantity of excellent religion can overcome the truth that the contracts had been, for all sensible functions, invalidated,” Tarasov mentioned. “When you invalidate the vote of the board that licensed the entry into these contracts, then this quantities to an invalidation of the contracts themselves.”
A spokesperson for the OTA mentioned it can not but touch upon the main points of that case, however factors to a authorized transfer it made final week as nicely: the OTA filed an appeal with the state’s supreme courtroom to re-decide whether or not it had certainly violated the Open Assembly Act.
The attraction challenges a number of of the courtroom’s findings, together with that it had “willfully” violated the Act, and that its agenda objects lacked enough particulars.
The e-mail cites an attorney general decision from 1981:
“If a public physique concludes that it could have violated the provisions of the Open Assembly Act in a willful method, the general public physique should totally rethink these manners acted upon in violation of the Act. Such reconsideration, in fact, have to be executed in compliance with the Act.”
That call additionally reads, “the phrase ‘willful’ in [state law] doesn’t require a exhibiting of dangerous religion, malice or wantonness, and contains unintentional violations.”
“OTA’s Board complied with Lawyer Basic opinion 1981 OK AG-214 when it totally reconsidered and voted to approve the contracts pursuant to OMA-compliant agenda objects at its Jan. 3 common assembly,” the e-mail reads.
The spokesperson mentioned the OTA’s ratification motion at its January 2023 board assembly “sufficiently rehabilitated what the Court docket discovered to be poor.”
“Plaintiffs’ new demand is an abuse of the judicial system in an effort to improperly threaten and strain public officers and its consultants to cease a much-needed public transportation enchancment and growth undertaking,” the spokesperson mentioned.
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