Santa Clarita Organization for Planning & the Environment v. Castaic Lake Water Agency

Opinion

HOFFSTADT, J.

This is a lawsuit to unwind a public water agency’s acquisition of all of the stock of a retail water purveyor within its territory. On appeal of the trial court’s order refusing to unwind the transaction, we confront three questions: (1) must we dismiss the appeal as untimely under the streamlined procedures available for validating certain acts of public agencies (Code Civ. Proc., § 860 et seq.) when those procedures were invoked below, but invoked improperly because the underlying acts fall outside the reach of the validation statutes?; (2) has the purveyor become the…