REPORT TO COUNCIL
SUBJECT
Title
Report from the City Attorney on California Voter Rights Act (CVRA) Litigation
Report
BACKGROUND
The Council has requested a report on the City's expenditures with respect to defending the Yumori-Kaku v. City of Santa Clara litigation (CVRA litigation). Because the reasonableness of the expenditures cannot be assessed without a completely transparent disclosure of the events that occurred throughout the litigation, I have attached to this report a Chronology of the key dates that are tied to the expenditures of the City and of the plaintiffs, respectively.
In order to draw conclusions about when litigation costs could have been avoided in the course of a lawsuit, it is critical to understand the difference between lawsuits in which the City is a defendant and lawsuits in which the City is the plaintiff.
Most of the time that the City becomes a party to litigation, it is the result of another party filing a complaint against the City as a defendant. When this happens, the City cannot terminate the litigation unilaterally. It must either participate in the litigation through trial in an effort to obtain a verdict in its favor, or convince the plaintiffs to settle the case and dismiss the complaint against the City.
When the City takes the very rare step of suing another entity or person, it serves and files a complaint on a defendant. In such cases, the City can unilaterally terminate such litigations by simply filing a dismissal of the complaint. Usually, this step will only occur if there is some type of settlement with the defendant. This was not the case in the CVRA litigation. Therefore, once the plaintiffs sued the City, the City was not in control of terminating the litigation.
The CVRA was a lawsuit that was brought against the City as defendant. Thus, the plaintiffs had the upper hand as to when and how the litigation could be terminated. As will be explained in detail in this report, until February 2021 the CVRA plain...
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