Like a juiced-up rubber ball, joy bounded across the sunny Pasadena City College campus this morning as news streaked down corridors and across the grounds that former president Mark Rocha’s fat check awarded at last summer’s ouster has been legally nullified.
A Los Angeles Superior Court judge ruled yesterday that Dr. Rocha must return his almost $400,000 severance agreement because PCC’s controversial Board of Trustees broke open-meeting laws while secretly negotiating the deal.
This dynamite finding hardly surprised PCC observers. It aligns precisely with accusations that organized faculty and student bodies often leveled against an administrator who appears to have left a string of positions “one step ahead of, or behind, the mob,” as one critic said.
Because Dr. Rocha widely was perceived to have regularly exceeded his governing authority in alleged “cozy cooperation” with the frequently criticized Trustees, this is the kind of sweet news hundreds of anti-Rocha campus opponents have been dreaming about.
The courtroom bombshell was dropped just one day after City College’s Academic Senate issued its latest no-confidence vote against the Trustees.
Ironically, the reason was the same as Judge Joanne O’Donnell found – violation of California’s open-meetings law, the Brown Act.
Judge O’Donnell said that negotiations by the Board of Trustees – broadly regarded as his “best or only friend” – for Dr. Rocha’s severance agreement should have been conducted in an open forum.
The judge gave PCC’s board 90 days to demonstrate how the nullified agreement will be broken apart and a new one written.
Throughout Dr. Rocha’s stormy four years, leading up to last August’s ouster at his 61st birthday, faculty and student leaders clashed virtually weekly with him over his unilateral manner of supervising the PCC community.
As the barrage of accusations of his perceived refusal to follow mandated shared governance guidelines piled up, Dr. Rocha’s opponents said two “harmful” clouds hung over the steadily darkening PCC campus:
- The more he offended the main Pasadena City College constituencies with his so-called dictatorial policies – unilaterally changing rules and schedules – the farther and faster he withdrew from public view.
- Dr. Rocha’s close relationship with the Board of Trustees, was branded “unhealthy” and “too cozy” by his opponents. Two years into his four-year tenure, at the height of a firestorm over his unilateral dropping of a Winter session, and when his ouster was being sought, Dr. Rocha curiously received an extension of his contract through 2016.
The Los Angeles Times reported that it “is unclear if and when Rocha would have to return the payment.”
