CONCORD — The Mt. Diablo Unified School District has abruptly abandoned plans to shake up the volunteer commission appointed to monitor its $150 million taxpayer-funded construction bond program. For now, the school board agreed to allow six members who boast more than a century of collective oversight experience to keep their appointments for at least another nine weeks.
While largely relieved to keep their posts, several citizen oversight commissioners said the district’s last-minute arrangement last week narrowly avoided a scheme that would have violated California law and jeopardized the district’s ability to continue construction projects planned over summer break.
In the days leading up to the board’s unanimous June 11 vote, district officials said that a majority of the Measure J Citizens’ Bond Oversight Committee needed to be removed because they’d completed two full, three-year terms — the maximum service allowed under the CBOC’s bylaws.
Trustee Debra Mason unexpectedly pivoted and pulled the item previously set to be approved without discussion, shocking commissioners who had predicted less than 30 minutes prior that Mt. Diablo’s elected officials were on track to oust six volunteers who have, collectively, served in various district oversight roles for upwards of 125 years.
During the June 11 meeting, Mason suggested that the terms for the six founding members of the CBOC, who were first appointed in 2019, will conclude by August 21. Notably, any member may continue to serve until a successor has been appointed to their seat. Following the new motion, MDUSD recognized the soon-to-be outgoing members of the CBOC for their work that “contributed significantly to ensuring transparency, fiscal accountability, and community trust in the District’s bond program.”
“We’re not trying to get rid of anybody,” Mason said before the vote. “We’re just opening the process again because there might be other people that would like to serve as well.”
Superintendent Dr. Adam Clark, trustees Debra Mason and Cherise Khaund, from left, listen during the Mount Diablo Unified School District board meeting in Concord, Calif., on Wednesday, June 11, 2025. (Jane Tyska/Bay Area News Group)
The CBOC is set to reconvene during a special meeting July 10. Gina Haynes, who chairs the commission, said that evening’s agenda may include discussions about proposed changes to the language within the group’s bylaws, which would be revisited before the end of 2025 – one of the five recommendations laid out in the county’s Civil Grand Jury report.
“I want to be clear: we’re not going rogue,” Haynes said in a phone interview. “We’re just trying to stay in alignment with what the law requires.”
But John Ferrante, who serves as the commission’s vice chair and at-large community representative, said the board also “saved (the district’s) ass” by not dismantling membership already constituted in the citizen’s oversight group, which was established as part of Proposition 39, a Nov. 2000 ballot measure California voters backed to lower the threshold from two-thirds to a 55% supermajority to approve school facility bonds.
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If the committee had fallen out of good standing last week, he said, the district could have been vulnerable to an injunction that halted any construction or other work tied to Measure J bond money.
“I don’t know who, if anyone, told (Trustee Mason) that information, but it’s the right thing to do – that’s the rules of the road.” Ferrante said in an interview the morning after the vote, later highlighting the similarities between the board’s unilateral vote regarding the board’s membership and a Contra Costa County Civil Grand Jury report released the day before MDUSD’s meeting, which found that the volunteer commission tasked with overseeing spending of the district’s Measure J money is insufficiently independent. “I think it’s kind of funny, myself.”
Superintendent Adam Clark didn’t speak during the CBOC roster discussion.
However, he continued to defend his district when reached by phone Tuesday afternoon, doubling down that staff has simply tried to follow the rules outlined the bylaws for the Measure J oversight commission, which were established during its first meeting in August of 2019. He also said that the Civil Grand Jury’s June 10 report was “vindicating” for him and the board’s decisions.
Marc Joffe, a public policy analyst and president of the Contra Costa Taxpayers Association, said these kinds of consequences illustrate the importance of the CBOC, which aimed to ease homeowners’ concerns about tax hikes intended to pay for hundreds of millions of dollars in facilities upgrades and other projects across the 55 campuses that make up Mt. Diablo Unified.
“(The district) can’t have it both ways,” Joffe said in an interview. “If you’re going to go for a lower percentage when you approve your bonds, you have to provide the level of transparency and oversight that is promised by Proposition 39.”