Dean Andal discusses the proposal by Mountain House developers that was to have brough a Delta College campus to the Mountain House property. (Glenn Moore/San Joaquin News-Service)

Andal denies any role in Delta violation of open government

Republican congressional candidate Dean Andal denied this week that he played any part in San Joaquin Delta College trustees' alleged violation of open government laws.

A report issued last week by the San Joaquin County Civil Grand Jury charged Delta trustees with leaking to developers closed-session information about a deal to build a satellite campus in Mountain House — a violation of the Brown Act, a state law that governs how elected leaders must conduct themselves in both closed and public meetings.

Andal works as a consultant for Mountain House developer Gerry Kamilos, whose company, PCCP Mountain House LLC, has several employees.

Trustee Ted Simas, who voted against going forward exclusively with the Mountain House plan in 2006, said he vividly recalls a telephone conversation with Andal in which the former assemblyman said that two Delta trustees shared closed-session information with Kamilos, his boss.

"He didn't say he got the information himself," Simas said. "But he did bring up a closed-session conversation."

At least one trustee faxed or telephoned Kamilos' office the day after the meeting in which trustees discussed Kamilos' failure to meet crucial deadlines, according to the grand jury report. The developer then came up with the documents necessary to continue, convincing trustees to stick with the Mountain House site, the report continues.

Ironically, the two trustees who allegedly leaked that the board was considering the Tracy site over the one in Mountain House had just come out of a three-hour Brown Act training session, Simas said.

Simas, like everyone else on the seven-member board, attended an all-day retreat at the Wine and Roses Hotel in Lodi, which was where trustees also met in closed session to talk about a violation of contract on the part of Kamilos' company, PCCP.

In the private meeting, trustees and the school's lawyer, Mark Ornellas, talked about whether to press charges against the developer for what they called a breach of contract and failure to meet deadlines, actions that wasted taxpayer money.

Shortly after the trustees' retreat, when Simas arrived at his Manteca home, his wife answered a phone call from Andal. He asked to talk to Simas, then-president of the Delta College board.

"I was tired," said Simas, reading the order of events from his diary, where he recorded the details of his conversation. "So I told my wife to say I'd call back the next morning."

Simas said he made the call at 9 a.m. the next day. Andal is quoted in a Stockton Record article dated Aug. 21, 2006, that he has no recollection of the conversation.

"Andal greeted me with, 'I thought you didn't like the 11th Street property,'" Simas read from his notes, which he said he meticulously wrote down minutes after the conversation. "He then proceeded to say that (PCCP) didn't breach the agreement. I had to ask him to slow down. I was completely caught off guard (and) didn't know what he was talking about at first."

He said he was amazed that Andal knew what was said behind closed doors.

"He knew what I said, he knew what the lawyers said," Simas recounted. "If I wasn't caught off guard, I'd have thought to ask who told him all that."

Simas recalled that Andal told him to stick with Kamilos and the Mountain House property off Interstate 205 and said that by encouraging trustees to reconsider the Tracy offer for a south county campus, Ornellas was feeding the board bad advice.

"Two of your trustees called my boss," Simas said he remembers Andal saying.

Andal was unavailable for comment earlier this week. But his campaign manager, Richard Temple, said the Stockton consultant did not get any closed-session information.

"If someone had tried to give me closed session information, I would have stopped it," said Temple, reading a statement from Andal, who for decades as a politician has worked under the Brown Act's parameters.

Allegations that trustees contacted Andal directly are "pure conjecture and inference," Temple said Monday.

Though who specifically received the information at PCCP remains in question, Kamilos wound up with knowledge that compromised Delta's bargaining advantage, Simas, the grand jury and Delta lawyer Ornellas agreed.

Trustees who shared closed-session conversations with Kamilos' company "almost certainly compromised the interests of the district," Ornellas wrote in a letter to trustees after their violation of the Brown Act on Feb. 9, 2006.

Kamilos, in a letter sent to Delta College lawyers that same month, wrote, "I have … learned that, based on this purported breach, Delta may seek to rescind the agreement."

A week later, in mid-February 2006, Kamilos and his lawyer showed up to a meeting between his company and the college armed with a defense to the charge that his company flouted the Mountain House-Delta College contract by missing "critical deadlines."

Andal was lobbying on Kamilos' behalf in favor of the Mountain House campus at the time and has, since 2004, had a contract that entitles him to a percentage of all future land sales in the master-planned subdivision, according to federal financial disclosure statements filed in 2007.

Temple said he's confident charges of wrongdoing against Andal will blow over.

"I think his reputation speaks for itself," he said of his client, who has called for ethics reform in Congress. "I don't think there's anything to this."

Contact reporter Jennifer Wadsworth at jwadsworth@tracypress.com.