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In a rare rebuke of a sitting member, the Santa Clara Valley Water District board of directors agreed on Feb. 13 to consider a censure against Rebecca Eisenberg, who allegedly took confidential documents from the district’s headquarters.
After a tense discussion, the Valley Water board voted 5-1 to schedule a public hearing within 30 days to consider admonition, sanction or censure against Eisenberg, a Palo Alto attorney who joined the board in 2022 and who has since clashed repeatedly with her board colleagues, district staff and Valley Water CEO Rick Callender.
As the news organization San Jose Spotlight reported last year, Eisenberg had been a subject of numerous complaints from Valley Water staff who accused her of intimidating staff and for gender discrimination against men. The complaints prompted the district to launch an investigation into Eisenberg’s conduct, which an outside attorney completed in December, according to Valley Water staff.
The move to censure Eisenberg followed a Jan. 29 incident in which board members were invited by Clerk of the Board Michele King to view the results of the investigation into Eisenberg’s conduct in a secure room inside the district’s San Jose headquarters. In a Feb. 2 memo to the board, Callender wrote that Eisenberg took the report out of the building despite being advised that she is not authorized to do so.
He included in this report a timeline of events from the Jan. 29 episode and surveillance photos showing Eisenberg leaving the building with a large stack of documents that she is holding in both hands. Callender also wrote in the memo that he has asked the San Jose Police Department and the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s office to investigate the incident.
Eisenberg did not dispute that she took the documents from the district’s San Jose headquarters on Jan. 29 but maintained that she did nothing illegal. She called the district’s actions “very odd” and told the board on Feb. 13 that she has not shared the information she took with anyone, including her attorneys.
“I took home a printout that I’m entitled to,” Eisenberg said during the Feb. 13 discussion. “I never denied it. I left through the front door. No one ever asked me about it and no one asked me for it back.”
Eisenberg also said that having a hearing on something she is not denying is “unnecessary, arbitrary and cruel.”
Her colleagues disagreed. Board member Tony Estremera, who serves on the Ethics Committee, said all board members were informed that reviewing the investigative report was a “privileged, confidential process” and that each member was instructed not to take the report. He made the motion to schedule the hearing to consider her censure, a decision that he said is based on the results of the memo from Callender.
“We were put in a locked conference room, we were allowed to view the reports and then they were returned to the clerk, consistent with her instructions,” Estremera said. “Each of us did that except for Rebecca Eisenberg, who removed the reports knowing that she was told she could not remove them.”
Board Chair Nai Hsueh repeatedly reminded her colleagues that the Feb. 13 discussion only pertained to whether or not the board should schedule a hearing to consider censure, not to delve into the arguments for or against censure. Hsueh, who supported scheduling the hearing, based her decision on Callender’s memo and its detailed information about what he characterized as “theft” of confidential documents.
Eisenberg, meanwhile, criticized the district for failing to get her input before it got the police involved and embarked on a path toward censure, a move she called “premature and inappropriate.”
“It doesn’t make sense to have a hearing about me that doesn’t include me and to have the decision about whether you’ll have a decision about me, without me,” Eisenberg said. “None of the materials on which you made your decision to put this on the agenda included my input and that violates human decency in addition to common sense, in addition to all standard rules.”
She also submitted a memo to the board that accused Callender of bullying her and other staff. She said that staff had been contacting her over the course of the 13-month investigation to state their support of her and to provide “lengthy personal experiences of malevolent actions taken against them and others by the CEO.”
Eisenberg wrote that she stands by her actions and has “no regrets about standing up for myself, standing up for employees, including the three labor unions at Valley Water, and standing up for my constituents, who elected me for this very purpose: to expose and rid this $10 billion agency of corruption, harassment, and misappropriation of ratepayer and taxpayer funds.”
Callender, for his part, argued in the memo that Eisenberg’s engagement in what he called “potentially illegal behavior” warrants further action by the board. Though he said that he is not aware of the full contents of the documents that Eisenberg took, he wrote that he believes it to be “the full investigative report, which includes the names of witnesses, their full and unredacted statements, and other personal information which will cause a severe chilling effect on any potential witnesses to illegal, discriminatory or harassing behavior that may occur at Valley Water.”
“If an employee had engaged in the behaviors which likely to have occurred, they would be placed on immediate administrative leave and be subjected to disciplinary actions, including potential dismissal,” Callender wrote.
