A tangle of litigation continues to stall upgrades to Monterey High’s stadium.

Four years ago, the Monterey Peninsula Unified School District put forward a project that was not expected to inspire opposition: An update to Monterey High School’s stadium, including lights for the playing field, a strength and conditioning center and a new softball and multi-use field in an adjacent dirt lot.

Yet to date, not a pile of dirt has been moved, just reams of paper, as the project has been mired in litigation for over two years. And that’s not expected to change anytime soon. The latest salvo in the drama came on Oct. 23, when Monterey County Superior Court Judge Thomas Wills affirmed, in a lawsuit originally filed against the district in 2021 by a group called Preserving the Peace, that the district’s environmental review of the project is adequate and complete. Local environmental attorney Molly Erickson, representing Preserving the Peace, has appealed the ruling.

Erickson is also representing a different group, Taxpayers for MPUSD Accountability, in a lawsuit filed in 2022 that also takes aim at the stadium project, but from a different angle. It names as a defendant the Division of the State Architect, part of the state Department of General Services, which oversees capital improvement projects on public schools. The next hearing in that lawsuit is Nov. 9, and Erickson – who built her case from sifting through documents amassed from multiple California Public Records Act requests – is asking the court to vacate approvals of both the stadium project and a separate parking lot project (which the district has dropped). Her claim centers on a fire and safety document related to the parking project that had a digital signature from a Monterey Fire Department fire marshal from 2020 that was copied and pasted by district staff—at the direction of a DSA official—onto subsequent forms relating to the various iterations of the projects. Altering or falsifying a public record, the lawsuit argues, violates state code and “destroys transparency of government…and makes public records unreliable.”

California Deputy Attorney General Jerry Yen, representing DSA, filed multiple responses in the past few months seeking to have the lawsuit dismissed. The latest, on Oct. 18, argued that the allegations are moot, and that past versions of a project are outside the scope of DSA’s charge when approving a project. Furthermore, Yen argues, the document at the center of Erickson’s allegations – a form with the digital signature of a local fire marshal – was not required, and that the project didn’t require signoff from a fire marshal.

Attorneys from Lozano Smith, the law firm representing MPUSD in the litigation, concurred with DSA’s stance, and took aim at Erickson’s allegations and asked that the court dismiss the lawsuit. “Enough is enough,” MPUSD’s attorneys wrote, arguing that Erickson’s arguments are full of smoke, but there’s no fire. “There is not a present controversy for this court to adjudicate,” they wrote, “even assuming there were any past wrongs committed by the district.”

MPUSD Superintendent PK Diffenbaugh, who is also named, as a defendant, declined to comment on pending litigation.

Editor's note: This story has been updated to reflect that the court records show the signature was pasted by district officials at the direction of a DSA official.